Digitalcopyright.hk

Abstract

The project is funded by the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) General Support Programme whilst development of the project is led by iResource Center under HK Cyberport Management Company.

Two main services will be provided on this platform:
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- Digital Vault (DV)

Project Name

A unified Digital Asset Management platform (http://www.digitalcopyright.hk/) for the Hong Kong Creative industries in the i-Resource Centre at Hong Kong Cyberport.

Project Vision

• Facilitate the distribution of legitimate digital content across all platforms and devices

• Accelerate the adoption of IPR protection technology by lowering the technological, investment and management barriers

• Provide digital artists with a safe place for permanent archival of their works

• Provide independent content-producers more creative space to deliver innovative products

• Help to stimulate more research in DAM and its related technologies using this HK’s first public platform as a test-bed

Project Goals

• Provide a unified digital asset management platform for content owners to

• Define a common set of content usage rules and licensing information

• Achieve interoperability across multiple digital rights management platform by defining usage rights in standard based expressions

• Enforce usage rights across multiple digital rights management technology, platform and playback devices

• Uniquely identify audio/visual items with a common set of metadata
  Permanently archive master copy of digital content

Provide a unified digital asset management platform for end users/consumers to

• Discover content, metadata and associated usage rights with a unique identifier

• Enjoy legitimate digital content with their preferred device, file format and portable usage conditions

Conduct trainings and seminars to SME and content creators on digital rights management and how to make use of the DAM/DRM platform for intellectual rights protection

Project Overview

Download an overview on this project

The project is funded by the Innovation and Technology Fund General Support Programme whilst development of the project was led by iResource Center under HK Cyberport Management Company. Two main services will be provided on this platform: Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Digital Vault (DV). The DRM service will adopt the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved system which is also backed by organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Warner Bros., Universal Music Group… etc. With this platform, content creators, large or small, can utilize the latest international-standard DRM solutions with minimum efforts and investments to distribute contents on these fast-growing channels and new distribution modes. This platform also provides the DV service for the content creators to archive their works safely, permanently and easily.

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Project Background

Hong Kong is renowned for its creative industries and they contributes greatly to Hong Kong overall’s economy. However, the proliferation of the internet and new technologies has lead to the privacy issues which have affected the industries’ revenues, and the resulting chain-effects are shrinking the industries. Most content creators lack the expertise or the investment to establish DAM/DRM solution to protect their content. Furthermore, the lack of de-facto a DRM standards also hinders their adoption into this new technology. This is no doubt a serious threat to Hong Kong’s leading position in content creation in Asia.

With the emerging ISO DRM standard and the availability of excellent supporting facilities at the Cyberport, a DAM platform will help the content creation companies, especially the SMEs, in Hong Kong to distribute and manage their creations with the new distribution methods. The main benefit of this proposed unified solution is that it makes investment more effective by eliminating the need of different companies investing more or less the same technology to carry out one common task.

Content creators spend tremendous amount of efforts to create their works and they should be well protected. In addition to the DRM solution, a ‘Digital Vault’ service with fixed content address systems can be used. The contents stored in the system can be archived safely using WORM (write once read many) technology after a definable retention period. This process should be made transparent to the users.

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This proposed platform will accelerate the adoption of this new and important technology by lowering the technological, investment and management barriers. This platform, being the first DAM platform available publicly in Hong Kong, will likely to spin off more research in DAM and its related technologies using this platform as a test-bed. The availability of this platform to anyone will give independent content-producers more creative space to make more innovative products. Since this platform is using a next generation fixed content address server, it can archive the digital contents safely and securely. Artists do not need to worry about finding a safe place for permanent archival of their works and this systems can be a central repository for the digital artists in Hong Kong.

MPEG21 REL

Our system will make use of MPEG21 REL for specifying usage rights and facilitate content exchange with other DRM systems. MPEG REL is approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) [1]. MEPG REL [2] is an XML-based Rights Expression Language used to specify terms and conditions for the authorized distribution and use of any digital content. This rich language will be used not only in the entertainment industry, but also by enterprises and individuals to enable the authorized distribution and persistent protection of valuable data and content in accordance with privacy and confidentiality requirements. Here are some highlights of ISO MPEG REL:

• Supports a wide variety of business models in the digital content distribution value-chain independent of content type or industry.
• Provides an extremely flexible authorization model to describe what the consumer or users is permitted to do with the content.
• Is independent of formats, products, security technology or other DRM system components.
• Enables automated multi-tier distribution of digital content while protecting the rights of the content owners and the interests of the users
• Is a precise, unambiguous, machine-readable language that can be used in conjunction with other industry standards, including those addressing Web services
• Is ready for immediate implementation to support digital content sales or the distribution of enterprise information.

More details on MPEG21 REL can be found in a white paper.[3]

References:
[1] http://www.iso.ch/
[2] http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-21/mpeg-21.htm
[3] http://www.rightscom.com/files/MPEG21_RELwhite_paper.pdf

Customers

Our platform is built for the following groups of users:

1. Producers – creators of the digital contents e.g. independent music composers, independent film makers, animators, photographers, education material developers, game developers…etc.
2. Distributors – people responsible for selling the contents on channels, and may administrate the licensing issues. e.g. record companies, agencies, online stores…etc.
3. Users – people who buy the contents, mostly consumers. The producers themselves could be the users for incorporating existing contents in their new creations. e.g. consumers, school teachers, producers, film makers, content creators…etc.

Those three target groups could come from the following industrial sectors: Music, Edutainment, Games, Advertising and Animation (MEGAA)

Project Schedule

Contact Us

If you are interested to know more about the project, please contact us by email: iresource@cyberport.com.hk