Government-backed Digital Catapult has unveiled an open source platform to help content creators track their work on the internet and help protect copyrights.
The Open Permissions Platform (OPP), based on the work between the Digital Catapult and the Copyright Hub, performs M2M transactions and queries for digital creations across all industries to help manage the discovery of licensing and lending digital creations.
According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the UK’s creative industries are one of the fastest growing sectors in the country, generating £9.6m per hour for the economy.
However, Digital Catapult says that often ‘creatives’ are unable to track where their work is being used as it enters the digital realm and struggle to fully realise revenue from it.
The OPP has now been designed to allow developers to build technologies and solutions around digital asset permissions and licensing.
The organisation expects this to fuel sustainable growth across numerous industries in the "fragmented social media age".
The OPP has been built to give creators and producers a simplified and universal language to record permissions to digital trackable assets accurately.
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Elsewhere, for brokers it will act as a mechanism to absorb all digitally trackable assets into one unified technical system, reducing the need for human-to-human negotiations and in turn operating costs.
Furthermore, users will get a standardised method for identifying the permission associated to digital assets, while innovators will be able to use an open framework following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for the World Wide Web, allowing for the system to evolve to the innovators needs
Andrew Carr, COO at Digital Catapult, said: "Until now there has been no standardised way of communicating efficiently between the content creator, broker and seller, with each party speaking its own language.
"In today’s social media age, where every 60 seconds, 300 hours of YouTube video are uploaded and 216,000 new photos are posted on Instagram, there is an even greater need for a standardised method of communication to help content creators to manage their digital creations and have clear visibility of how, and when, they’re being used by other parties."
Carr also said that with the OPP, Digital Catapult has created a licensing platform which hopes to kick-start a movement that could change the way digital creations are used and licensed.
"We want to enable and empower the UK to lead the way in licensing, and believe it is a big step to be releasing the OPP to the developer community as open source technology. With the OPP, licensing a creation through the use of lawyers, emails, and snail mail will become a thing of the past," he said.
