Abstract: Digital Rights Management(DRM) technology is crucial to a prosperous and meaningful development of digital contents industry, thereinw digital rights usage control mechanisms can guarantee that end users access to contents,transfer and share the corresponding rights by an authorized model. Based on an analysis of preventive and reactive DRM research roadmaps, a survey of research advances and progresses was made on Rights Expression Languages (REL)and usage control, rights delegation and transferring, trusted rights execution and secure terminal platform regarding a generic DRM system and Mobile DRM, as well as representative RELs and formalized usage control models were analyzed and compared. Finally, some open issues and challenges on digital rights usage control were addressed.

Key words: Digital rights management, Usage control, Rights expression languages, Security model, Trusted computing