Hargreaves Review and the 'Digital Copyright Exchange' - superstore or directory?

Dear reader

I attended a Roundtable Discussion with Professor Hargreaves and Baroness Wilcox (IP Minister) last week, hosted by IPPR, to discuss the  Hargreaves Report - "Digital Opportunity - a Review of Intellectual Property and Growth."

One of the main topics discussed was the Report's 'big idea', the proposal to create a Digital Copyright Exchange (“DCE”). It's undoubtedly the ‘Digital Opportunity’, the means to unlock the UK’s creative industries’ economic potential and to solve the problems of rights clearances which so often get copyright law a bad press.

Hargreaves is right in the sense that the marriage of copyright and technology to automate the ways in which copyright works are located and cleared, and permissions for use communicated to users, is not simply convenient in the 21^st century. Automated licensing is essential and the Report paints a clear picture of the benefits for creators, intermediary rights holders, consumers and users.

So Hargreaves certainly has high hopes for the DCE. “The prize is to build on the UK’s current competitive advantage in creative content to become a leader in licensing services for global content markets; in short to make the UK the best place in the world to do business in digital content.”

But what exactly is the DCE? Is it a virtual content megastore or exchange in UK cyberspace for rights owners, traders and users to trade or is it more of a brand name to describe a collection of rights registries and rights databases across the Internet?

Professor Hargreaves and his team have, I think, deliberately not been prescriptive. So the answer I believe is that the DCE is a mixture of both. The Report states: “The aim is to establish a network of interoperable databases to provide a common platform for licensing transaction.”   The magic word is “interoperable”.

The key to understanding the DCE is to realise that many of the elements needed to automate licensing already exist, based on a variety of technical standards developed by the music, film, publishing and other sectors of the creative industries. There are digital identifiers to identify works which can persist across the network such as the DOI and EIDR which emerged from the publishing and audio-visual industries respectively. In addition, rights registries to record the often-multiple numbers of owners in works, such as the Global Repertoire for Musical Works, already exist or are emerging from different industry sectors. In addition, we also have well established formats such as XML for communicating permissions so that when users clicks an on-screen icon they can see what they can and can’t do with the material.

The challenge which the DCE encapsulates is to pull all this together into a working, interoperable whole. This needs vision and drive to harness  on-going technical work which is needed so that all the disparate databases of rights information and copyright works of all kinds can communicate with each other on a cross-industry, global basis and respond to the machine-enabled requests of all rights intermediaries and users.

Hargreaves does not volunteer the Government for the job of creating the DCE – “That way lies a nightmare of IT procurement followed by the birth of a white elephant”.  Rather, Hargreaves sees the Government as a convenor of all the relevant interests. That said, the Report suggests some incentives to explore such as making the sanctions under the Digital Economy Act apply only to infringements involving works available through the DCE.

I am not sure about that. If the DCE is to come about, it will need huge effort on behalf of all the participants in the creative industries and this will need to be driven by voluntary commercial and creative incentives.

Above all, making the ‘DCE’ a reality, in the broader sense of a network of interconnected, intra-communicating rights registries, content databases, will need to be an international effort, based on internationally accepted technical standards. For the UK, this means seizing the opportunity to play a leading role in Europe, as part of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda to bring this about.

Certainly, there are also opportunities for UK commercial entities, public institutions, public/private partnerships and collecting societies to build the servers and to deliver the services to unleash the potential of our creative industries. In that sense, there can be lots of DCE’s. The key thing is that they can all communicate with each other and with everyone in the copyright chain, from creators, producers and intermediaries to the citizen and consumer.

So well done Professor Hargreaves for articulating this vision. Let’s get to work.

Have a good week

Laurie Kaye

Comments

[Maxine Horn]

Great overview Laurence - you might be interested to review Creative Barcode and our direct response back to the Hargreaves review on behalf of the design and visual creative industries communities.

http://www.creativebarcode.com/newsitem?item=34

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