The EU and media industry launched...

The EU and media industry launched a pilot to enable more use of digital content, they said Thursday. The Rights Data Integration (RDI) project will implement work by the Linked Content Coalition on a technical framework to help copyright owners and users manage and trade rights for all kinds of usage of all types of content and protected works in all media, they said. That will move the content industry closer to figuring out how to assert ownership and communicate copyright terms and conditions in the digital arena in a way machines and people can understand, they said. RDI is an early pilot for the “copyright hub” strategy under development in the U.K. and under consideration in Europe and the U.S., they said. It will use a “hub and spoke” architecture that lets users find and access information from rightsholders via a central transformation hub, they said. The hub will transform the data into a common format and then into a format accepted by exchanges that provide the interface for users, they said. RDI doesn’t directly affect copyright laws and agreements but makes it possible to process the results of those contracts in a more highly automatable way, they said. The project will run for 27 months, they said. Media participants include Elsevier, Getty Images and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations.