Real Competition
Not to be outdone, RealNetworks, the leader in streaming media and Microsoft's top competitor in the network-delivered video on demand market, began work on its own DRM language in 1999. It called the new XML-derived dialect eXtensible Media Commerce Language (XMCL), and quickly began drumming up industry support for what it hoped would become a new standard in rights expression.
The goal of XMCL is essentially the same as that of XrML: to enable interoperability between trusted systems. Yet the fact that RealNetworks chose to call its standard a commerce language is significant. Instead of developing a broad grammar for defining access parameters for a variety of networked content and services as ContentGuard has done, XMCL is more narrowly focused on describing the business rules that define existing e-commerce business models.
By June 2001, the XMCL Initiative boasted the endorsements of Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Napster, and Sun among others. Conspicuously absent from the attendance roster, however, were representatives from Microsoft—and for good reason. None of them were invited. As one unnamed RealNetworks executive told Wired magazine, "We were afraid they'd wreck the party."
Unmoved, Microsoft is still backing its own horse in the rights expression race. According to product manager Geordie Wilson, XMCL "doesn't seem to add any clear benefits to XrML." Some industry analysts agree, characterizing XMCL more as a competitive tactic than a serious effort. "This whole XMCL initiative on the surface appears to fill a real need in the audio and video space, but implicitly it's kind of a jab at Microsoft," says Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Mark Mooradian.
For that jab to become a knockout punch, XMCL must first beat out the earlier standard in volume software deployment. Judging by that benchmark, ContentGuard emerges the winner. While only one company—Microsoft—is cited as having actually implemented XrML, as of this writing XMCL can't even match that claim. RealNetworks itself has yet to incorporate the language into its RealSystem Media Commerce Suite, leaving XMCL without a single product to showcase its capabilities.
Wide Open
Renato Iannella of Australian DRM vendor IPR Systems isn't satisfied with choosing between XrML and XMCL. Although both ContentGuard and RealNetworks claim that their languages are open standards, in reality, each is the product of a single company's vision, and each remains under the primary control of its respective parent. The problem with that, Iannella believes, is that most DRM vendors' perspectives are far too narrow.
"Traditional DRM (even though it is still a new discipline) has predominately taken a closed approach to solving problems," Iannella wrote in an IPR Systems position paper for a W3C workshop on DRM held in January 2001. "That is, DRM has primarily focused on the content protection issues more than the rights management issues." When rights management technologies are colored by ideas pertaining to security and data protection, Iannella states, the usefulness of those technologies is often severely diminished.
Years earlier, thinking about this very issue led Iannella to develop an entirely new XML-based rights expression grammar, one he called the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL). He envisions this language eventually becoming part of a larger Open Digital Rights Management framework, one that would encompass not just the technical aspects of DRM, but the business, social, and legal issues as well.
The ODRL language focuses on a simple, extensible rights-management model that encompasses a small set of core elements. The specification is published for use without restriction, "in the spirit of open source software," and it reached version 1.0 status in November 2001. Even so, ODRL remains arguably the least mature of the current rights expression languages. Like XMCL, it has yet to be implemented in any shipping product.
