ITWire

Angela Wills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, the organisation that initiated the LCC said: "The industry has come together to provide technical solutions for rights management, allowing potential users better information and access to content, and enabling creators and rights holders of all kinds to be properly rewarded and/or acknowledged for their efforts.

"Copyright legislation is still workable and relevant but we need new technology to make copyright work online as easily and effectively as it does offline. We need technical solutions for technical platforms; which is what gave rise to the name of our original project, "The answer to the machine is in the machine."

The LCC describes itself as being "not a new standards organisation, rather a collaboration across different media sectors to pull existing systems together and to plug any gaps by working with existing standards bodies."

It says that workstream leaders will report to the plenary on progress and plans on:

- Identification: A set of requirements for identification to provide a uniform approach to accessing rights data (for both people and machines), with an analysis to which existing standard identifiers meet these requirements and of where gaps exist, and recommendations on how these gaps might be filled;

- Metadata: Different sectors use different terminology. The supply chain requires an effective means of enabling these to work together when required so information can be passed as accurately and automatically as possible;

- Messaging: This group will come up with a set of requirements for messaging within the rights data supply chain, based on use cases, analysis of existing messages and technologies meeting these requirements and of gaps, and recommendations for closing such gaps.

- Iconography: The purpose of this work is to specify a set of standard human-understandable icons representing both a link to copyright information and a set of permitted uses.

The project, announced in April, is the brainchild of the European Publishers Council, a high level group of chairmen and CEOs of leading European media corporations actively involved in multimedia markets spanning newspaper, magazine, book, journal, Internet and online database publishers, and radio and TV broadcasting.

The full 40 strong list of LCC members is available here. However members whose primary focus is information and communications technologies rather than content and delivery are conspicuous by their absence: Microsoft is the only one.

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