Standardisation of the management of Intellectual Property Rights in multimedia content

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management is a key issue for the deployment of real e-commerce and multimedia content distribution on the Web. Music market knows, very well this problem, and very different approaches are being considered to cope with the issue. One valid approach to solve the problem is to develop standards allowing interoperability of solutions, a relevant problem nowadays. MPEG is one of the international standardisation initiatives that is trying to go along this way. In particular, the new MPEG-21 standard is proposing that the standardisation of a digital rights expression language and a rights data dictionary would help to improve systems and applications interoperability. The main objective of the paper is to present our approach to this issue, that goes one step forward than MPEG, since we are developing a semantic approach to represent and manage IPR.