The Challenge: From MPEG Intellectual Property Rights Ontologies to Smart Contracts and Blockchains [Standards in a Nutshell]

Abstract

Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an ISO/IEC working group developing media coding standards. This includes a set of ontologies for the codification of intellectual property rights (IPR) information related to media. The Media Value Chain Ontology (MVCO) facilitates rights tracking for fair, timely and transparent payment of royalties by capturing user roles and their permissible actions on a particular IP entity. The Audio Value Chain Ontology (AVCO) extends MVCO functionality related to description of IP entities in the audio domain, e.g., multi-track audio and time-segments. The Media Contract Ontology (MCO) facilitates the conversion of narrative contracts to digital ones. Furthermore, the axioms in these ontologies can drive the execution of rights-related workflows in a controlled environment, e.g. blockchains, where transparency and interoperability is favoured towards fair trade of music and media. Thus, the aim of this article is to create awareness of the MPEG IPR ontologies developed in the last few years and the work that is currently taking placeaddressing the challenge identified -towards their execution as smart contracts on blockchain environments. BACKGROUND MOTIVATIONCopyright legislation has continuously evolved with the aim to revive the music industry, in terms of fair and increased revenues returned to artists and rights holders, improved multiterritory licensing, timely payments, and overall more transparency, e.g., US Music Modernisation Act [1] and EU Copyright Directive Reform [2]. Meanwhile, several key artists and musicians have turned their hopes for resolving these issues to technology and in particular, towards blockchain [3][4]. Blockchain emerged in 2008 as the technology that underpins bitcoin. It operates as a shared ledger, which continuously records transactions or information. Its database structure, where

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