Generation of Standardised Rights Expressions from Contracts: An Ontology Approach?

Distribution of multimedia copyrighted material is a hot topic for the music and entertainment industry. Piracy, peer to peer networks and portable devices make multimedia content easily transferable without respecting the associated rights and protection mechanisms. Standard and industry-led initiatives try to prevent this unauthorised usage by means of electronic protection and governance mechanisms. On the other hand, different organisations have been handling related legal issues by means of paper contracts. Now, the question is: How can we relate electronic protection measures with the paper contracts behind them? This paper presents an analysis of current contract clauses and an approach to generate, from them, standardised rights expressions, or licenses, in an as automatic as possible way. A mapping between those contract clauses and MPEG-21 REL (Rights Expression Language), the most promising rights expressions standard, is also proposed, including an initial relational model database structure. An ontology-based approach for the problem is also pointed out. If contract clauses could be expressed as part of an ontology, this would facilitate the automatic licenses generation. Generic contracts ontologies and specific intellectual property rights ontologies would be the starting point, together with the presented analysis.