Rights glossary and questionnaire

RAI is one of the partners of the PrestoPRIME project, an important European project concerning audiovisual contents and their future as digital contents, as well as access for all.

PrestoPRIME researched and developed dynamic processes that can preserve indefinitely not only the audiovisual signal but also its evolving associations, context and rights. In the field of the protection of intellectual property, the project developed a rights management system that manages content at all stages of its lifecycle, in all contexts of use. RAI, with its rights archive department, led the activity on rights management.

Rights clearance and management operations represent the major bottleneck in the exploitation of archived audiovisual contents. The development of new technologies raises the question of whether an archive or a broadcaster is still entitled to exploit the audiovisual work within the rights granted, or whether such new technology requires new rights.

The mode of transmission, the time period, the territorial coverage and the number of broadcast transmissions have become fundamental factors. Rights statements are included in contract texts in free form, without an agreed and unambiguous terminology. The association between the contract and the content is generally implicit. Statements can apply to different parts of the content, and there is no explicit association between shots and rights. Rights can have a temporal span and are often reacquired or renegotiated subsequently.

At present every nation, or even every broadcaster, defines its own rights glossary. The rights trade, especially for movies and sport events, is worldwide. Every broadcaster that acquires the rights to transmit an event therefore has to translate the acquired rights clauses into its own glossary of rights. This can imply improper use of the content through a misinterpretation of clauses. A common and simplified model for rights descriptions would greatly improve the situation, at least for the archiving of newly born digital content. It should be possible to sign contracts based on commonly agreed terms, which could be modelled and associated with the audiovisual content as metadata.

The first step of the work in PrestoPRIME was to create a simple and shared glossary defining rights and exploitation. The rights glossary contains almost all rights definitions taken from the most important agreements made by RAI. The definitions were split as far as possible on the basis of different kinds of agreements, such as American majors, worldwide sport federations and private production and distribution companies.

The project invited feedback on the glossary, including suggestions and objections, in order to increase or modify it. The original questionnaire asked for responses by 1 September. The glossary and questionnaire remain available in the download panel.

On the basis of the glossary, the project developed a European rights ontology and an associated data model to create an integrated management system for rights along the lifecycle from acquisition to editing, archive and distribution. The rights management system maps rights to the content timeline as metadata.

Published 16 July 2009. The glossary was released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. Read the licence terms (opens in a new tab).