In the midst of the heated European debate on adapting copyright law to the digital environment, the EU co-funded project ARDITO brought together the video/audiovisual and image sectors in Barcelona on 22 September to discuss how to use technology to connect creative content with rights information across the internet, with the goal to create a true digital market place for copyright protected content.
Project partners Album, b<>com and the Copyright Hub presented the tools being developed as part of the project in technical work-streams, and where users can find out about permissions directly from content they have discovered, bearing in mind that the content is available wherever it is discovered on the Internet because ARDITO is using identifiers that cannot be stripped, such as watermarks and digital fingerprints technologies.
Richard Hooper, Honorary President, The Copyright Hub Foundation, said “Owners of copyright, creators, ought to be paid properly for their works – especially when it is reused. Central to our vision is that good quality data facilitates licensing, but we must improve data with unique identifiers for copyright work and licences, and ARDITO supports this vision”.
Building on existing e-infrastructures, rights data standards and identifiers ARDITO will accelerate the development of the Rights Data Network, in three key ways:
- Optimising a range of content identification technologies (watermarks, content recognition, DOIs) for use in the Rights Data Network,
- Integrating them into the Copyright Hub ecosystem, and
- Developing new services, ready to bring to the market.
Sergi Grino, CEO Album, led a discussion group on image identifiers and metadata focussing on how to overcome metadata stripping to lead the final user to the copyright holder. He said: “Current image files formats do not allow preventing metadata stripping, but content recognition technologies can address this problem by identifying assets without the need of embedded metadata”.
Gaëtan Le Guelvouit, Lab manager, b<>com, said « digital watermarking and visual search are the tools of choice to create a persistent link between a digital content asset and its ID, this will allow for format conversion and sharing of content while the metadata will remain intact».
Background:
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.
The vision of the ARDITO project 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.
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.rdi-project.eu) which was a project that tested the technical framework developed by the Linked Content Coalition (www.linkedcontentcoalition.org). 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 January 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.
