Digital Contracts: The new economy disruptor

Digital contracts are mechanisms to express the terms and conditions for digital content usage. Many attempts in the past have struggled with proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) infrastructure to assure content and rights information are transparently transacted. Digital permissions can also support Privacy and other policy assertions related to usage of digital data where no enforcement is desirable. With the emergence of HTML5 and Encrypted Media Extensions, we can envisage a truly open DRM system with digital contracts. This presentation will provide an overview of the past and present work in digital rights, and the emerging W3C permission expression language (ODRL). It will also cover the potential disruption with contract data becoming a part of the BlockChain infrastructure to support independently verifiable rights transactions.