Heritage follows through on copyright portal CCOP commitments with new cash

An Alberta-based company has received a second round of funding from Canadian Heritage to develop a copyright portal as the department follows through on a key Canadian Culture Online Program commitment. On December 2, Canadian Heritage announced a total of $2,746,530 in funding to three organizations to develop online tools to access copyrighted works and to pay the attendant royalties, including Calgary-based RightsMarket Inc.The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright) and La Société québécoise de gestion collective des droits de reproduction (COPIBEC) are also developing projects, with $962,889 and $868,876 in Canadian Heritage funding respectively. To build a broader portal with the involvement of about 10 Canadian collectives, the government has turned to RightsMarket.The three projects don't overlap and RightsMarket should have a head start on building a broad portal after already finishing one this year for the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). That project was announced last March with $787,392 in Canadian Heritage dollars (CNM Update, Mar. 13/02). SOCAN is now using the portal, at www.rightsclearinghouse.ca, to permit users to access a database of musical works and remit payments online.It's hoped that an online system will mitigate the effects of widescale music piracy, allow artists to recoup royalty revenue and develop an ecommerce market missing until now. The prototype went smoothly, says RightsMarket CEO John Krpan, and marks the end of SOCAN's involvement with the project since it now has a working site. The site was developed with Toronto-based Digital Content Management Services (DCMS).Now both companies are involved in a second round to implement the same online rights system for a bigger group of collective societies with a broader range of material - from e-books to video and images. Krpan says the project is ambitious."(The SOCAN project) was to establish the first online licensing web-enabled portal prototype," he tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. "A lot of the other players in the industry…were interested, then, in getting the same functionality. This is sort of phase two of that same project which is to extend usability to other collectives. It's an expansion of the same project to other players and there'll be increased functionality as well, bringing various databases together to improve the base of information that you can draw from, driving towards a single point of contact for all licensing."Krpan hopes the project will be up and running by the spring of 2003 but concedes the initiative will be challenging. "It's a big project for us because it's got a fairly large systems integration component as opposed to just a products sale. It requires modification and some new development of functionality…It's fairly ambitious. It's realistic, but it's ambitious."The initiative is being funded from Canadian Heritage's three-year, $3-million Electronic Copyright Fund, a niche envelope within the Canadian Culture Online Program. To be eligible, RightsMarket and DCMS had to demonstrate interoperability with other online copyright clearance systems, as well as provide a user interface in both official languages.One of the hurdles RightsMarket will have to overcome as it tries to standardize the various databases for use in an online clearance system will be the lack of standardization in the industry. Digital rights management and technological protection measures are still in nascent stages as far as widespread use in the retail and consumer markets, and a standard technology may be slow in coming."This would be one step in that direction," says Krpan. "It's not ubiquitous enough in this industry. Others, perhaps, but in the music industry it's quite disjointed at this point. To say the least, it's a challenge."

Heritage follows through on copyright portal CCOP commitments with new cash

News | 12/11/2002 5:00 am EST

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