Rights and clearance

Status: draft proposal. v0.92 has no rights or clearance node. The example on this page validates today because it carries the proposed shape under x- keys in metadata. Nothing here is final, and the shape is open to change after review.

The question

In a delivered shot, different components can have different owners and different terms at the same time. A VFX vendor keeps its rig and licenses the final frames to the studio. A brand's logo appears on a vehicle under a separate permission. Answering may this be delivered, to whom, where, and for how long needs the terms attached to the specific component, and it needs the answer to change as the work does.

What already exists

The proposal reuses established work.

• ODRL, the W3C Open Digital Rights Language, is a policy language. A Policy (Set, Offer or Agreement) holds Permission, Prohibition and Duty entries. Each acts on an Asset through an Action, can be limited by Constraints such as territory or time, and names the parties. IPTC's RightsML is a profile of it for news and photo rights.
• PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) supplies a usage vocabulary, and separates the license from releases for the people and property depicted.
• MDDF Avails carries territory, license type and windows for distribution. See MDDF Avails.
• C2PA and CAWG carry signed assertions on finished content, including consent and data-mining terms. They are an export target, not a place to keep live production rights.

How much is ODRL used? Less in media than the specification's standing suggests. ODRL became a W3C Recommendation in 2018 and its community group is still active, including a July 2026 workshop on its future. Its working deployments are in data spaces (the International Data Spaces Association, the Eclipse Dataspace Protocol, Gaia-X), in JPEG Trust for image usage policies, and in a European Union Intellectual Property Office recommendation. In news, IPTC's RightsML is built on it, but large agencies such as AP, Reuters and dpa still state rights in human-readable text. Its formal semantics for evaluating a policy are still being worked out. That is why this proposal uses ODRL as a model to borrow and keeps the vocabulary slim, and uses the Avails vocabulary for distribution terms, which the industry already exchanges. See the W3C note on adoption and IPTC's workshop report.

These describe rights well once the work is finished or in a stock library. What none of them addresses is a composition still in production, where each component has its own terms and the terms change as approvals happen. That is the plane OWG already occupies, and OMC's scope is the production ontology, so rights terms sit alongside it rather than inside it.

The proposal

Two typed records, kept apart because they answer different questions:

The rights record is ODRL-shaped, so it can be read by anyone who knows ODRL. The proposal favors a slim, ODRL-compatible vocabulary over full ODRL, because reference, never absorb applies here as it does elsewhere. Full ODRL can be supported where a partner needs it.

{
  "id": "final_frames",
  "type": "image.sequence",
  "metadata": {
    "x-rights": {
      "kind": "Agreement",
      "permission": [
        { "action": "distribute", "assignee": "org_studio",
          "constraint": [{ "leftOperand": "spatial", "operator": "eq", "rightOperand": "worldwide" }] }
      ],
      "source_document": { "contract_id": "VFX-2026-0147" }
    }
  }
}

Rights and clearances are graph events with participants and timestamps, in line with the security model. A grant that is later withdrawn adds an event; it does not overwrite the record.

What this would enable

• Delivery gating. A qc task checks each component's terms against the delivery it belongs to. The delivery task depends on the check and on a legal sign-off.
• Answers by traversal. Which shots use a component whose license expires this year follows the same lineage edges as any other impact question.
• Export. At delivery, the graph can produce the distribution terms (Avails vocabulary) and signed assertions (CAWG) from what it holds at that moment.
• External records. Where an implementation records grants and receipts on a ledger or registry, the record's ID travels as an identifier on the asset, with a scope the ledger defines.

Reference workflow

rights-clearance-draft.owg.json — a vendor's rig and the studio's final frames carry different terms, a brand logo has a clearance on the shot, and delivery waits on a rights check and legal sign-off.

curl -O https://openworkflowgraph.org/corpus/rights-clearance-draft.owg.json
owg-validate rights-clearance-draft.owg.json --json

What to take from it:

• The rig and the frames are separate assets with separate terms, in one delivered shot.
• The clearance sits on the context, because it concerns what the shot shows.
• The gate is structural. The delivery task cannot start until the check and the sign-off complete.

Open questions

1. Slim ODRL-compatible vocabulary, or full ODRL from the start?
2. Should rights and clearance be new registries, or a profile-provided extension in the style of the SOM binding?
3. How much of PLUS's usage vocabulary to adopt, and which term lists to cite.
4. What counts as attested for a rights record: a signed contract reference, a counter-signature, or a credential.
5. How a withdrawal or expiry is represented, so it appears in queries without rewriting history.

Known gaps

• No schema support yet. The x-rights and x-clearance keys are placeholders for the proposal and are not validated beyond being valid JSON.
• Nothing here is legal advice or a substitute for a contract. The graph records what parties assert and when.
• The vocabulary needs review by people who license content for a living before it is called stable.

See also: MDDF Avails, Security model, Compliance, Standards bindings.