*VidMid-VoD Conference Call*
April 10, 2002

*Attendees*

Mairead Martin (chair) - U. Tennessee, Knoxville
John McNair - U. Tennessee, Knoxville
Steve Olshansky - Internet2
Ann West - Internet2/EDUCAUSE
Renee Frost - Internet2
Ken Klingenstein - Internet2
Ron Tipton - U. Tennessee, Knoxville
Mary Fran Yafchak - SURA
Jim DeRoest - U. Washington
William Rhodes - U. Tennessee, Knoxville
Brent Zionic (scribe)

*Discussion*

We began with an update on the proposed DRM workshop. The primary purpose of this endeavor has been to bring together middleware and content management folks. A preliminary draft is supported by EDUCAUSE, Internet2, and SURA. This proposal will be submitted by the end of the week (12-Apr-02) to the NSF for a date in late July or August.

The plan is to have a two-day workshop. Day one would be focused on an overview of Digital Rights Management and what it really means, as opposed to how the term has often been hijacked and appropriated. The second day would be an invitational session that focused on how middleware fits into the picture of rights management control. For this session, some standards-holders or contributors / arbiters may be invited, but the intention is not to bring any industry people. Ideally this will serve to initiate the creation of some kind of permanent forum for discussion on MW-DRM content. Grace Agnew had originated an idea on a metadata core for DRM, and though this may not be incorporated into the workshop, it may stand as a separate meeting.

Ken Klingenstein contributed these three key points: how does DRM relate to the issues of: 1) universities as content producers, 2) federated purchase/licensing of content in academia, and 3) civilian/citizen usage of these materials. Mairead requested comments and discussion on this workshop concept.

Next we had an update on the Shibboleth project. Ken noted that the first subset of libraries under SAML (OpenSAML.org) are going into alpha very soon. On April 29th there will be a meeting with numerous content providers in New York discussing how to deploy Shibboleth. Most of this work is not DRM-focused, of course, but it is certainly related; Shibboleth can be thought of as a possible tool for enabling more sophisticated DRM technologies through a layered approach.

Regarding the white papers, as per Ron Tipton's suggestions, there has been an effort to create flow diagrams consistent with those being used to represent VidMid-VC architectures. This discussion helped raise a few more points of clarification.

For example, we discussed the issue of how many directories are really needed. In each scenario, it appeared that we might want to have an "Endpoint" directory containing information about the end user devices and device capabilities. We discussed the possibility of having another joint VidMid call before April 15, for the purpose of "cross-pollinating" the work of both sub-groups, but did not come to a decision.

The need for alternate scenarios was raised, and included Ken's proposal for the inclusion of security considerations for inter-realm as well as intra-realm implementations. Ron Tipton also recommended including payment and transaction accommodation, but acknowledged that the added complexity of both of these scenarios made them difficult to incorporate. Renee Frost offered that perhaps it is best to include a note which justifies or explains why certain scenarios are not included at this time, rather than just noting that "this will be handled by a vendor solution or a third party."

The VidMid presentation at the Internet2 Spring Member Meeting in Arlington, VA was brought up next, and Mairead thought that something should be presented regarding DRM. She took an action item to draft some public position on the issue.

Finally, it was noted that Sun Microsystems had donated a server for VidMid use, and Renee and SteveO offered to keep up status notes on our progress to keep Sun in touch with the project.

*New Action Items*

1. [AI] 10-Apr-02 (TBD): Please submit comments on the MW-DRM workshop and help to initiate communications with the Library of Congress, ALA, etc.
2. [AI] 10-Apr-02 (Mairead): Submit a draft on a position on DRM for the Internet2 conference and the VidMid presentation.