A perspective: the role of identifiers in managing and protecting intellectual property in the digital age

There is an essential need for the owners of intellectual property rights to be able to identify uniquely the creative components which make up digitized multimedia content. The relationship between these identifiers and the “well-formed” metadata which describe them is critical to the successful management of rights in an electronic trading environment. By persistently associating creation identifiers with digital content, rights holders will effectively be able to licence, monitor, and track the usage of rights across digital networks. Within the evolution of the MPEG-4 standard, representatives of rights holders from across the creative industries worked with technologists to devise an effective solution for managing creation identifiers and their associated metadata within MPEG-4 objects. This was achieved in such a manner that the identifiers will continue to be associated with content that is manipulated and edited. In addition, through the valuable contribution of leading watermarking and encryption specialists, the MPEG-4 standard will contain an interface for applying intellectual property management and protection (IPMP) systems. These IPMP systems can be applied to MPEG-4 software and hardware devices that manage the delivery of copyright content to prevent unauthorized copying, the removal of identifiers, and therefore control and restrict fraudulent use. This paper describes and documents these issues which rights holders have worked collectively to address within the evolving MPEG-4 standard