A collaboration between different parts of the global creative industry, under the umbrella of the Linked Content Coalition (LCC), has resulted in the creation of a technical Framework to make it possible to manage and access online rights information across all types of media and content, whether text, image, sound or audio-visual.
The LCC Framework includes the Rights Reference Model (RRM), together with radical Best Practice Principles for using identifiers and communicating information about rights through supply chains. According to the LCC, this marks a highly significant development that brings together for the first time licensing data models and languages for all kinds of content.
The release of the Framework marks the completion of the first stage of the LCC’s work. There are also plans to use the Framework to create standards which will help enable the millions of individuals and small companies who now add content directly onto the Web every day to identify and manage their own rights much more effectively.
The LCC Framework is now available for peer review; it is also being tested in a project co-funded by the European Commission called Rights Data Integration (RDI), scheduled to start in May.
This will take live data Sources and Exchanges from all major content sectors and create a prototype multi-media rights data hub.
Meanwhile, discussions are underway for the LCC’s Rights Reference Model to form the basis of the UK’s new ‘Copyright Hub’. The Copyright Hub is being built and led by the UK’s creative industries following recommendations in the Hargreaves Report.