Over the past 20 years there has been an unprecedented explosion in the volume and types of digital creative content: from eBooks, music streaming and games, to online news and entertainment hubs and video-on-demand platforms.
The vision of the new ARDITO project, launching during the London Book Fair where several project partners will be meeting, is to automate the exchange of information about rights to any content type, between the owners of the content and users especially small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This will be done through a connected network of data – which we call the Rights Data Network.
Co-funded by the European Union Project Horizon 2020, ARDITO is all about providing simple tools and services to support SMEs in the creative content sector to find new business ideas though monetising the re-use of their content. In fact over 85% of all actors in the creative industries sector are small and medium sized businesses (SMEs), many of which are employing fewer than ten people but contributing enormous value to the digital value network.
Project Coordinator Paola Mazzucchi from mEDRA, one of the leading DOI registration agencies said “Everything is digital today throughout this extraordinary ‘value network’ from the production process, the products, the supply chains, through to the way in which digital products and services are made available to consumers. But when users wish to re-use creative content it is hard to find information about who to ask for permission, which licences are available, and on which terms – which is where ARDITO comes in.”
Building on existing e-infrastructures, rights data standards and identifiers ARDITO brings together a group of well-established SMEs from different creative sectors (books, audiovisual and images) with a leading research centre and the Copyright Hub to accelerate the development of the Rights Data Network, in three key ways:
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Optimising a range of content identification technologies (watermarks, content recognition, DOIs) for use in the RDN,
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Integrating them into the Copyright Hub ecosystem, and
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Developing new services, ready to bring to the market.
ARDITO will fill the gap in the digital content value network and connect online contents to rights information, by building a complementary digital rights data network (RDN). It does not start from scratch: it builds upon an earlier European Union co-funded project, the Rights Data Integration (RDI) Project (www.rdiproject.eu) which was a project that tested the technical framework developed by the Linked Content Coalition (www.linkedcontentcoalition.org). (i) The RDI Project demonstrated unequivocally how such a Rights Data Network could implement the LCC framework; and the Copyright Hub has provided a first implementation of how this works in practice.
The ARDITO project has a total duration of 18 months, and kicked off in February 2017. The project is structured into five work packages with clear deliverables – details of which can be found on our website www.ardito-project.eu together with information about the partners.
