Authorization for digital rights management in the geospatial domain

Since information is available in digital format, the protection of intellectual property and copyright fraud has become an important issue. This is, because the digital content can be copied without quality loss and with a reasonable effort of time, equipment and money. After copying, it can be distributed using the Internet, again with little effort of time and money. In such an environment, the loss of revenue for the music and film industry -- not only due to sites like Napster -- is becoming so tremendous, that mechanisms as described under the Digital Rights Management become important. In the geospatial domain, Spatial Data Infrastructures emerge that have the potential to provide high quality and up-to-date geographic information. This enables the endeavor of new market potentials and the creation of new business cases. However, the establishment of Digital Rights Management for geographic information is important in the first place. This paper introduces requirements for geospatial Digital Rights Management and illustrates the difference to known requirements for the music industry. The major contribution of this paper is the description of geospatial access control -- named GeoXACML -- as it can possibly be a solution to the authorization requirement for Digital Rights Management in the geospatial domain.