From OPIMA to MPEG IPMP-X: A standard's history across R&D projects

This paper describes the work performed by a number of companies and universities who have been working as a consortium under the umbrella of the European Union Framework Programme 5 (FP5), Information Society Technologies (IST) research program, in order to provide a set of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and architectures, aiming at helping to reduce the copyright circumvention risks, that have been threatening the music and film industries in their transition from the “analogue” to “digital” age. The paper starts by addressing some of the earlier standardization efforts in the DRM arena, namely, Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia Access (OPIMA). One of the described FP5 IST projects, Open Components for Controlled Access to Multimedia Material (OCCAMM), has developed the OPIMA vision. The paper addresses also the Motion Pictures Expert Group—MPEG DRM work, starting from the MPEG Intellectual Propriety Management and Protection—IPMP “Hooks”, towards the MPEG IPMP Extensions, which has originated the first DRM-related standard (MPEG-4 Part 13, called IPMP Extensions or IPMP-X) ever released by ISO up to the present days.2 The paper clarifies how the FP5 IST project MPEG Open Security for Embedded Systems (MOSES), has extended the OPIMA interfaces and architecture to achieve compliance with the MPEG IPMP-X standard, and how it has contributed to the achievement of “consensus” and to the specification, implementation (Reference Software) and validation (Conformance Testing) of the MPEG IPMP-X standard.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Digital Rights Management and Consumer Acceptability: A Multi-Disciplinary Discussion of Consumer Concerns and Expectations

The INDICARE project – the Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of DRM Solutions in Europe – has been set up to raise awareness about consumer and user issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions. One of the main goals of the INDICARE project is to contribute to the consensus-building among multiple players with heterogeneous interests in the digital environment. To promote this process and to contribute to the creation of a common level of understanding is the aim of the present report. It provides an overview of consumer concerns and expectations regarding DRMs, and discusses the findings from a social, legal, technical and business perspective. A general overview of the existing EC initiatives shows that questions of consumer acceptability of DRM have only recently begun to draw wider attention. A review of the relevant statements, studies and reports confirms that awareness of consumer concerns is still at a low level. Five major categories of concerns have been distinguished so far: (1) fair conditions of use and access to digital content, (2) privacy, (3) interoperability, (4) transparency and (5) various aspects of consumer friendliness. From the legal point of view, many of the identified issues go beyond the scope of copyright law, i.e. the field of law where DRM was traditionally discussed. Often they are a matter of general or sector-specific consumer protection law. Furthermore, it is still unclear to what extent technology and an appropriate design of technical solutions can provide an answer to some of the concerns of consumers. One goal of the technical chapter was exactly to highlight some of these technical possibilities. Finally, it is shown that consumer acceptability of DRM is important for the economic success of different business models based on DRM. Fair and responsive DRM design can be a profitable strategy, however DRM-free alternatives do exist too.Digital Rights Management; consumers; Intellectual property; business models

New Frontiers in Universal Multimedia Access

Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) refers to the ability to access by any user to the desired multimedia content(s) over any type of network with any device from anywhere and anytime. UMA is a key framework for multimedia content delivery service using metadata. This report consists of three parts. The first part of this report analyzes the state-of-the-art technologies in UMA, identifies the key issues and gives what are the new challenges that still remain to be resolved in UMA. The key issues in UMA include the adaptation of multimedia contents to bridge the gap between content creation and consuming, standardized metadata description that facilitates the adaptation (e.g. MPEG-7, MPEG-21 DIA, CC/PP), and UMA system designing considering its target application. The second part introduces our approach towards these challenges; how to jointly adapt multimedia contents including different modalities and balance their presentation in an optimal way. A scheme for adapting audiovisual contents and its metadata (text) to any screen is proposed to provide the best experience in browsing the desired content. The adaptation process is modeled as an optimization problem of the total value of the content provided to the user. The total content value is optimized by jointly controlling the balance between video and metadata presentation, the transformation of the video content, and the amount of the metadata to be presented. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptation scheme enables users to browse audiovisual contents with their metadata optimized to the screen size of their devices. The last part reports some potential UMA applications especially focusing on a universal access application to TV news archives as an example

Antitrust and Information Technologies

The relationship between antitrust policy and information was traditionally concerned with oral or written communications that had anticompetitive potential, mainly because they furthered collusion or market exclusion. Among the most difficult problems was interpreting the significance of communications that could be construed as either threats or offers to collude, or as facilitators of collusion. On the one hand, markets profit greatly from the free flow of information. On the other, particular uses of information threaten competition when they enable firms to coordinate price, output, or innovation. Of course, explicit price fixing is a use of information but so are various cartel-facilitating practices that depend on publicizing one’s price or output. As a result, the way information is communicated has been a factor in merger analysis, particularly when the fear is that the merger might facilitate collusion. A recent example of this concern is In re LIBOR-Based Financial Instruments Antitrust Litigation, which includes claims that banks used misreporting about interest rates as a device for manipulating them. U.S. courts have also confronted complaints that companies were exchanging wage and salary information to suppress or fix wages at an artificially high level. Individuals from numerous industries have made such claims, ranging from petroleum geologists, to high technology Silicon Valley employees, to law professors. Prior to the 1980s, “information” in antitrust enforcement meant mainly print media, radio, television, film, and audio recording. All were involved in antitrust disputes at one time or another, and the challenged practices ran the entire gamut of U.S. antitrust law—from vertical integration and exclusion in the 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. case, to unilateral refusal to deal in Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, to a series of newspaper mergers and the passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act in 1970 to protect newspaper production joint ventures. In Times-Picayune Publishing Co. v. United States, the Supreme Court refused to condemn a government-challenged tying arrangement in the newspaper publishing industry, exonerating a New Orleans newspaper publishing company’s practice of requiring that the same classified advertisements be run in its morning and evening editions. Finally, the Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. decision rejected an antitrust challenge and, in the process, acknowledged the value of nonexclusive, blanket copyright licenses for recorded music. Information also plays an important role in competition policy in the regulated industries, mainly because agencies depend on accurate information typically supplied by the regulated firms. As a result, misreporting one’s own market position can serve to exclude a rival or become a device for collusion. Or, in patent law, exaggerated claims about the validity or strength of one’s own patents can become a potent exclusion device. All of these issues concerning the relationship between competition policy and information remain today. Many are more important than ever given the ubiquity of information and the speed at which it travels. This Article considers a related but nevertheless distinct issue: the relationship between competition policy and the technologies of information. Technological change can both facilitate and undermine the use of information for anticompetitive practices. The effects are heavily, although not exclusively, a result of digitization and the many products and processes that it enables. Further, information technologies account for a significant portion of the difficulties that antitrust law encounters when it addresses intellectual property (IP) rights. In addition, changes in the technologies of information affect the structures of certain products, in the process either increasing or decreasing the potential for competitive harm. Of particular importance here are the measurement of market power in heavily digital technologies; the changing role of consumer choice in digital markets, focusing here on the Google Search investigation; the impact of digitization on the opportunities for collusion, focusing on the Apple eBooks antitrust case; the role of the antitrust laws in facilitating net neutrality or other conceptions of internet competition; and the role of information in antitrust evaluation of patent practices, particularly those pertaining to FRAND licensing in markets subject to standard setting, and patent pools

Antitrust and Information Technologies

The relationship between antitrust policy and information was traditionally concerned with oral or written communications that had anticompetitive potential, mainly because they furthered collusion or market exclusion. Among the most difficult problems was interpreting the significance of communications that could be construed as either threats or offers to collude, or as facilitators of collusion. On the one hand, markets profit greatly from the free flow of information. On the other, particular uses of information threaten competition when they enable firms to coordinate price, output, or innovation. Of course, explicit price fixing is a use of information but so are various cartel-facilitating practices that depend on publicizing one’s price or output. As a result, the way information is communicated has been a factor in merger analysis, particularly when the fear is that the merger might facilitate collusion. A recent example of this concern is In re LIBOR-Based Financial Instruments Antitrust Litigation, which includes claims that banks used misreporting about interest rates as a device for manipulating them. U.S. courts have also confronted complaints that companies were exchanging wage and salary information to suppress or fix wages at an artificially high level. Individuals from numerous industries have made such claims, ranging from petroleum geologists, to high technology Silicon Valley employees, to law professors. Prior to the 1980s, “information” in antitrust enforcement meant mainly print media, radio, television, film, and audio recording. All were involved in antitrust disputes at one time or another, and the challenged practices ran the entire gamut of U.S. antitrust law—from vertical integration and exclusion in the 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. case, to unilateral refusal to deal in Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, to a series of newspaper mergers and the passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act in 1970 to protect newspaper production joint ventures. In Times-Picayune Publishing Co. v. United States, the Supreme Court refused to condemn a government-challenged tying arrangement in the newspaper publishing industry, exonerating a New Orleans newspaper publishing company’s practice of requiring that the same classified advertisements be run in its morning and evening editions. Finally, the Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. decision rejected an antitrust challenge and, in the process, acknowledged the value of nonexclusive, blanket copyright licenses for recorded music. Information also plays an important role in competition policy in the regulated industries, mainly because agencies depend on accurate information typically supplied by the regulated firms. As a result, misreporting one’s own market position can serve to exclude a rival or become a device for collusion. Or, in patent law, exaggerated claims about the validity or strength of one’s own patents can become a potent exclusion device. All of these issues concerning the relationship between competition policy and information remain today. Many are more important than ever given the ubiquity of information and the speed at which it travels. This Article considers a related but nevertheless distinct issue: the relationship between competition policy and the technologies of information. Technological change can both facilitate and undermine the use of information for anticompetitive practices. The effects are heavily, although not exclusively, a result of digitization and the many products and processes that it enables. Further, information technologies account for a significant portion of the difficulties that antitrust law encounters when it addresses intellectual property (IP) rights. In addition, changes in the technologies of information affect the structures of certain products, in the process either increasing or decreasing the potential for competitive harm. Of particular importance here are the measurement of market power in heavily digital technologies; the changing role of consumer choice in digital markets, focusing here on the Google Search investigation; the impact of digitization on the opportunities for collusion, focusing on the Apple eBooks antitrust case; the role of the antitrust laws in facilitating net neutrality or other conceptions of internet competition; and the role of information in antitrust evaluation of patent practices, particularly those pertaining to FRAND licensing in markets subject to standard setting, and patent pools

Digital Audio in the Library

An incomplete draft of a book intended to serve as a guide and reference for librarians who are responsible for implementing digital audio services in their libraries. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, Digital Audio Technology, covers the fundamentals of recorded sound and digital audio, including a description of digital audio formats, how digital audio is delivered to the listener, and how digital audio is created. Part 2, Digital Audio in the Library, covers digitizing local collections, providing streaming audio reserves, and using digital audio to preserve analog recordings

iDRM - Interoperability Mechanisms for Open Rights Management Platforms

Today’s technology is raising important challenges in the Intellectual Property (IP) field in general and to Copyright in particular [Arkenbout et al., 2004]. The same technology that has made possible the access to content in a ubiquitous manner, available to everyone in a simple and fast way, is also the main responsible for the challenges affecting the digital content IP of our days [Chiariglione, 2000]. Technological solutions and legal frameworks were created to meet these new challenges. From the technological point of view, Rights Management Systems (RMS) and Copy Protection Systems (CPS) have been developed and deployed to try to cope with them. At first, they seemed to work however, their closed and non-interoperable nature and a growing number of wrong strategic business decisions, soon lead to a strong opposition. One of the strongest negative points is the lack of rights management interoperability [Geer, 2004]. The work presented on this thesis primarily addresses the RMS interoperability problems. The objective of the thesis is to present some possible mechanisms to improve the interoperability between the different existing and emerging rights management platforms [Guth, 2003a]. Several different possible directions to rights management interoperability are pointed in this thesis. One of the most important is openness. Interoperability between different rights management mechanisms can only be achieved if they are open up to a certain level. Based on this concept, an open rights management platform is designed and presented in this thesis. Also, some of the interoperability mechanisms are presented and explained. This platform makes usage of the emerging service-oriented architectures to provide a set of distributed rights management services. Rights management solutions rely heavily on the establishment of authenticated and trust environments between its different elements. While considering different RMS, the establishment of such trust environments can be somehow complex. This thesis provides a contribution to the establishment of interoperable RMS trust environments through the usage of Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) mechanisms. Modern rights management systems have to handle with both keying material and licenses which are used mostly to define how content is governed by the system. Managing this is a complex and hard task when different rights management solutions are considered. This thesis presents and describes a generic model to handle the key and license management life cycle, that can be used to establish a global interoperable management solution between different RMS

MPEG-SCORM : ontologia de metadados interoperáveis para integração de padrões multimídia e e-learning

Orientador: Yuzo IanoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: A convergência entre as mídias digitais propõe uma integração entre as TIC, focadas no domínio do multimídia (sob a responsabilidade do Moving Picture Experts Group, constituindo o subcomitê ISO / IEC JTC1 SC29), e as TICE, (TIC para a Educação, geridas pelo ISO / IEC JTC1 SC36), destacando-se os padrões MPEG, empregados na forma de conteúdo e metadados para o multimídia, e as TICE, aplicadas à Educação a Distância, ou e-Learning (o aprendizado eletrônico). Neste sentido, coloca-se a problemática de desenvolver uma correspondência interoperável de bases normativas, atingindo assim uma proposta inovadora na convergência entre as mídias digitais e as aplicações para e-Learning, essencialmente multimídia. Para este fim, propõe-se criar e aplicar uma ontologia de metadados interoperáveis para web, TV digital e extensões para dispositivos móveis, baseada na integração entre os padrões de metadados MPEG-21 e SCORM, empregando a linguagem XPathAbstract: The convergence of digital media offers an integration of the ICT, focused on telecommunications and multimedia domain (under responsibility of the Moving Picture Experts Group, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29), with the ICTE (the ICT for Education, managed by the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36), highlighting the MPEG formats, featured as content and as description metadata potentially applied to the Multimedia or Digital TV and as a technology applied to e-Learning. Regarding this, it is presented the problem of developing an interoperable matching for normative bases, achieving an innovative proposal in the convergence between digital Telecommunications and applications for e-Learning, both essentially multimedia. To achieve this purpose, it is proposed to creating a ontology for interoperability between educational applications in Digital TV environments and vice-versa, simultaneously facilitating the creation of learning metadata based objects for Digital TV programs as well as providing multimedia video content as learning objects for Distance Education. This ontology is designed as interoperable metadata for the Web, Digital TV and e-Learning, built on the integration between MPEG-21 and SCORM metadata standards, employing the XPath languageDoutoradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaDoutor em Engenharia ElétricaCAPE