Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ARDITO (Access to rights data via identification technologies optimisation)

Teaser

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. Everything is digital today throughout this...

Summary

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.
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 end users.

However there is a dark lacuna when it comes to the digital ‘rights data network’ to support the value chain.
Everything is digital when it comes to creative content, but not the actual functioning of the rights supply chains needed to power, and enable such legal re-use.

ARDITO partners got together to accelerate the development of the Rights Data Network underpinning a sustainable digital single market for EU creative industries and create a network of identification technologies and services automatically linking creative content to rights information and services in the digital environment, through:
· optimising a range of content identification technologies (watermarks, content recognition, DOIs and web resolvable identifiers),
· integrating them into the Copyright Hub ecosystem, and
· developing new services, ready to bring to the market.

This objective has been met with the integrated ecosystem that ARDITO delivered to connect and benefit both creators and producers who hold rights in creative content and content users alike.

Work performed

In its 18 months’ lifespan ARDITO delivered an integrated ecosystem supporting multiple identification technologies and services to connect content creators and content users through human and machine-to- machine interfaces.

The solutions delivered are innovative and scalable to new applications, creating new business opportunities for project partners as well as for SMEs and other organisations operating in the creative sector, thanks to its open standard-based structure.

The ARDITO integrated ecosystem features multiple services available on the market for content creators and rightholders:
· image visual search service that identifies an image by checking its visual content and returns licensing status and options
· crawler service that discovers images published across the Internet and is connected to image visual search to identify the original image and its rights and licensing status
· fingerprinting service that recognises textual content used on the web and links to rights, permissions and licenses of the original e-book
· e-book watermarking service to embed and surface rights and permission in watermarked individual e-books
· cloud based video watermarking service to embed and surface rights and permissions in watermarked videos and video fragments
· service that provides persistent and web resolvable identification of copyright deposits - ARDI Service - and two implemented applications in other identification services
· improved services and infrastructure of the Copyright Hub platform to facilitate the interactions with content creators and providers.

ARDITO integrated ecosystem provides a coherent content users’ experience on the Internet for all types of content and services:
· the eCopyright symbol which may be added in any webpage to provide a link through the Hub to the relevant permissions information or service.
· the Copyright Hub browser plug-ins, which identify any type of content online and retrieve the links to licences or additional services.

The final result is that the ARDITO integrated ecosystem is made of production services ready to be adopted by creative SMEs and creative industries and that will be exploited according to a partner’s knowledge of the market and business plans.

The outreach and dissemination strategy supporting the exploitation of ARDITO’s results was structured through organising on the one side our own events and conferences, and on the other in actively participating in events organised by other players in the creative sector. ARDITO focused on impacting the industry, mainly SMEs but also larger players who can be key allies to reach a critical mass, without underestimating the value of a strong and positive impact on policy makers and regulators.

This two-fold strategy allowed for the definition and implementation of use cases and for the cooperation with key partners that will help with building the market and maintain the market growth.

Final results

ARDITO goes beyond the state of the art in terms of the technical solutions deployed and of the services enabled through the ARDITO integrated ecosystem.

The technical solutions optimized the existing identification technologies used by partners by:
· improving their scalability and overcoming existing limitations extending them to new domains of application
· enriching them with new functionalities
· linking them to rights data
· integrating them into the Copyright Hub.

The technical solutions were then turned into services for the market by:
· making the them available as additional features of the existing services or as brand new services
· including them into third parties’ service offers
· developing the needed interfaces for customers to access, monitor and manage the services
· extending or creating new back office module and interfaces for service and customer management.

Moreover, ARDITO contributed to the evolution of the Linked Content Coalition standards as the version of the DRS schema, revised and implemented in ARDITO, was accepted to be formally adopted and published as an LCC standard as well as the revised and simplified LCC Entity Model that forms the basis for the extended interoperability of the Copyright Hub.

The result is a suite of new services both for content creators and content users that did not pre-exist, and their impact is expected to be critical for the creation of a sustainable digital single market for EU creative industries.
The potential impact of this cannot be underestimated especially given the renewed focus during discussions on copyright reform at EU level on technical protections and measures to manage rights in the digital single market.

A range of use cases and applications for each service and for the integrated ecosystem were identified and implemented during the project, involving SMEs, creators and their service providers, thus creating the basis for take-up of the services and for the growth of the amount of content available to connect with end users. Applications for ISBN agencies, e-book publishers, voluntary copyright registration agencies, collective management organisations, small video producers are available and more will be added, such as applications for multi-media and newspaper publishers. The news media sector is ripe for take up of ARDITO services as market participants look for more efficient ways of tracking usage of their content whether text, images of video across the web.

Finally the diffusion of the eCopyright symbol as a visible symbol representing a standard for behaviour on the Internet for copyright is expected to have an impact on society, helping to address the need to educate content consumers who may not know that they need to engage with copyright when using or reusing content online.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.ardito-project.eu.