Abstract: This paper describes an interoperable Digital Rights Management architecture promoted by the MPEG standardization group in its new standard known as MPEG-M or MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM). The goal of this standard is to promote the packaging and reusability of MPEG technologies, and for this it specifies a software middleware platform and a complete set of APIs and protocols. These APIs allow uniformly handling digital content and developing generic multimedia applications, through a set of modules communicated with standard protocols. The MXM standard provides the necessary mechanisms to digitally manage the rights over Intellectual Property, the tools to protect the media and the means to grant the rights enforcement, besides a rich set of libraries to reproduce the content. Keywords: Middleware · DRM · Content management · MPEG-21