Associated Press Interest in W3C eBooks Workshop http://www.w3.org/QA/2012/11/w3c_and_digital_publishing.html Stuart Myles - Director of Schema Standards smyles@ap.org @smyles * Participant's Interest I am the Director of Schema Standards at the Associated Press http://www.ap.org . The Associated Press, a not-for-profit news cooperative, owned by its American newspaper and broadcast members, is one of the world's largest newsgathering organizations. AP employs the latest technology to collect and distribute content to its members, international subscribers and commercial customers. AP has the industry’s most sophisticated digital photo network; a 24-hour continuously updated online, multimedia news service; a state-of-the-art television news service; and one of the largest radio networks in the U.S. I represent AP to the International Press Telecommunications Council http://www.iptc.org . The IPTC is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for content exchange, including NewsML, rNews and standards for expressing photo metadata. At the IPTC, I co-chair the News Exchange Formats Working Group, the Semantic News Working Party and the Rights Working Party. Within the Rights Working Party, I have been leading IPTC's efforts to express rights and restrictions for news content, principally focused on the development of RightsML http://dev.iptc.org/RightsML which is currently in an "experimental phase" within the news industry. * My Point of View - The News Industry Need for Machine Readable Rights Various news publishers have identified the ability to be able to express rights in a machine readable way as being a priority. In part, this reflects the fundamental changes that have been transforming the news industry. Once, an agency such as AP distributed content to editors at newspapers and broadcasters, who would select which items they would use. In the process of this selection, they would be able to read any editors' notes, which could include any restrictions that needed to be observed. However, increasingly, news outlets are fully automated, with very little - if any - editorial oversight of what is published. Amongst other things, this drives the need for the expression of rights and restrictions in a way that can be evaluated automatically. This automation would allow the editorial process to be more efficient. In general, an editor still needs to exercise their judgement as to whether a particular restriction applies in a particular context. But, automatic evaluation of rights and restrictions can identify the items that need those decisions, rather than having editors inspect every single item. (This exercise of editorial judgement means that these systems are not like DRM, in which particular actions are forbidden and typically enforced by the devices involved). * IPTC and Rights Expression Over the last couple of years, the IPTC has reviewed how the various news formats that it maintains allow for the expression of rights. In every case, there are currently semi-structured ways to express rights using natural language, which wouldn't easily allow for the fully machine-readable rights expressions that member companies need to express. On the other hand, the IPTC has consistently decided that it didn't want to develop a machine-readable rights expression itself - members of the IPTC have felt qualified to develop news formats, whereas legal matters are a different domain. * ODRL and RightsML After reviewing several candidates, the IPTC felt that Open Digital Rights v2 was the best fit for an existing rights expression language. In particular, it offers the ability to create an industry-specific rights vocabulary that can be "plugged in" to the ODRL framework. The IPTC has been working to develop the news-specific rights vocabulary - now dubbed "RightsML" - and with the ODRL group to help refine the ODRL v2 framework itself. ODRL is now a W3C Community Group http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/ * IPTC and LCC/RDI The Linked Content Coalition http://www.linkedcontentcoalition.org/ is "an initiative to improve access to, and licensing of, digital content for any media and use." It launched in April 2012, with over 40 members, including the IPTC. It aims to specify a framework for rights data interoperability, including ODRL and RightsML for news content. The LCC aims to work with all content types - book, journal, news, image, sound recordings, audiovisual, games etc. The Rights Data Integration Project is an EC funded project, due to start in Jan 2013, with the goal of creating a working prototype of the LCC specifications. * Suggestions I would like to discuss the experience that the IPTC and the news industry has had in developing the RightsML vocabulary and working with the ODRL rights framework. In particular, I'd like to explore the challenges in adopting fully-automated rights expression, such as changes to editorial workflows, overcoming technical hurdles and embedding rights in binaries (such as photo and video). I would also like to learn more about the solutions being developed specifically for the ebook industry, as there is a lot of overlap (in technologies, content and participants) with the news industry.