Standardisation of the management of intellectual property rights in multimedia content

Intellectual property rights (IPR) management is a key issue for the deployment of real e-commerce and multimedia content distribution on the Web. The music market is well aware of this problem, and very different approaches are being considered to cope with it. One valid approach is to develop standards allowing interoperability of solutions, and MPEG is one international standardisation initiative trying to do this. In particular, the new MPEG-21 standard is proposing that the standardisation of a digital rights expression language and rights data dictionary would help to improve system and application interoperability. The main objective of the paper is to present our approach, that goes one step further than MPEG, since we are developing a semantic approach to represent and manage IPR.