Semantic Copyright Management of Media Fragments

The amount of media in the Web poses many scalability issues and among them copyright management. This problem becomes even bigger when not just the copyright of pieces of content has to be considered, but also media fragments. Fragments and the management of their rights, beyond simple access control, are the centrepiece for media reuse. This can become an enormous market where copyright has to be managed through the whole value chain. To attain the required level of scalability, it is necessary to provide highly expressive rights representations that can be connected to media fragments. Ontologies provide enough expressive power and facilitate the implementation of copyright management solutions that can scale in such a scenario. The proposed Copyright Ontology is based on Semantic Web technologies, which facilitate implementations at the Web scale, can reuse existing recommendations for media fragments identifiers and interoperate with existing standards. To illustrate these benefits, the papers presents a use case where the ontology is used to enable copyright reasoning on top of DDEX data, the industry standard for information exchange along media value chains.