Collaboration between Axel Springer, the European Publishers Council, the Danish Producers Association, the UK's ITV, Microsoft, News International and the RTL Group, 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 seamlessly across all types of media and content, whether text, image, sound or audio-visual.

In a nutshell, the LCC Framework includes a Rights Reference Model (RRM) together with Best Practice Principles for using identifiers and communicating information about rights through supply chains.

The release of the Framework marks the completion of the first stage of the LCC's work. LCC also plans to use the Framework to create standards that 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 more effectively.

"This is a major step in streamlining and automating rights management for media and the creative industries. Now we will test the Framework in a major project, co-funded by the European Commission," says LCC Chairman and Senior Vice-President of Investor Relations and Public Affairs for Axel Springer, Christoph Keese. "This will tackle the burgeoning problem of digital orphans when creators upload new self-published works to the networks and video platforms. In future, by declaring rights at point of upload, creators will get recognition and indeed have the opportunity to get paid."

The LCC Framework does not dictate business models but supports an infrastructure for the creative industries to develop their own. The RRM will be a catalyst to encourage the automated management of content rights in the digital network. The LCC provides a technical framework for interoperability: how it is used is entirely up to those who wish to benefit from it.

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), due to start in May.

Story filed 12.04.13