Creative industries start work on global rights project

The Linked Content Coalition (LCC), the global project to facilitate the communication and expression of digital rights information in the creative content sector, has held its first plenary meeting, which will inform the technical work of the project.

LCC will develop a rights reference model that should allow end users to overcome the hurdle of the multiple standards and licences currently required to access and use different online content. The model should also allow creators to make their work available, knowing that their copyright information is machine-readable and transferable across different platforms.

There are several potential benefits of the project, believe the LCC members. For example, a start-up business should be able to aggregate content without hours of separate negotiations with the different licensing and standards organisations. It should also encourage new creators to put works online legally and it make life simpler for e-retailers dealing with different content.

‘This is an exciting and forward-looking project. It’s about providing technical solutions that make copyright work for creators and end users and enable business models that may yet be unimagined. It is an example of the creative sector taking responsibility for a sustainable future,’ commented Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, the organisation that initiated the LCC project.

The meeting, which was held in Brussels in late June, involved representatives from across the content sector, including EMI Music Publishing, Pearson, RTL's Freemantle Media and Microsoft. The coalition aims to extent the membership of the project to encourage participation across all content-related sectors including e-retailing.