TRG Adds Contract Usage Rights Data to FITS Inventory Platform

New York-based inventory management software vendor TRG Screen has released version 4.05 of its FITS (Financial Information Tracking System) platform, featuring a purpose-built Rights Management repository for firms to track contractual and usage rights, alongside the data that these contracts cover.

This feature—also dubbed a “Rights Dictionary”—allows firms to define which parts of their organization have the rights to access specific datasets, including individuals in different departments and office locations, and to generate alerts when someone obtains access to a data service that they are not permissioned to use.

“In a system like FITS, you already have all the other information about services—what you use, how much it costs, and contact and contract renewal information,” says Richard Mundell, chief product officer at TRG.

Over the past year, through a series of client working groups, TRG identified five main areas where firms need help handling digital rights—capture, storage, interpretation, socializing, and compliance.

“It’s clear that managing, complying with, and just simply understanding usage rights around data agreements, and making sure that vendors are being paid properly for the data being consumed is a big concern,” Mundell says. “Some user firms were good at some of these but not others. No firm was perfect, and no firm was bad at all of them.”

So TRG prioritized its efforts based on where it saw the most pain points, and focused in this initial release on storing the contractual rights data in a structured way, and on “socializing” it to users—the process of ensuring that employees understand how they are allowed to use data.

FITS Rights Management contains more than 60 types of usage terms that could apply to a firm’s contractual agreements, and clients can configure their own terms via a series of drop-down menus.

“Clients can now also see and track those rights in FITS. It’s a repository with a strong taxonomy, and that foundation allows us to add value by adding the ‘socialization’ aspect,” Mundell says. “The first step for any market data professional to ensure compliance with contract terms is to make sure end users understand the terms and what they are allowed to the data—for example, whether they can redistribute it.”

Mundell says TRG spoke with more than 100 clients, who told the vendor that their end users handle data responsibly if they understand the terms of usage and are educated on how they can and cannot use the data.

“Most sharing outside the terms of a contract is accidental,” he says. “This is about having a good-faith relationship with your data vendor … and ensuring that all sides are sticking to the spirit of the agreement, and taking steps to stay within the limits of that agreement,” which firms can validate by using TRG’s ResearchMonitor usage tracking tool, he adds.

Steps to a Full Solution

Industry wide efforts to address the challenges surrounding digital rights management, such as the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL)—an XML-based standard governed by the World Wide Web Consortium—will ultimately create  a situation where incorporating ODRL into applications makes it impossible for them to support non-compliant data use.

But with such a capability still several years away, “We want to give our clients a practical solution now,” Mundell says, adding that FITS Rights Management allows firms to future-proof their architectures, because even if a firm adopts ODRL, it will still need systems in place to store any data using ODRL. “It’s just another way of getting usage rights into a system,” he says.