LUCID Rights: Leveraging Uncertainty in Content & Metadata to Enable Indelible Digital Rights

Creative content is the undisputed driving force and focal point of the majority of online consumer activity today. However, a lot of the current and past commercial value is lost by not allowing for image and video content to be uniquely and robustly linked to copyright and ownership details. Further, in the professional media industry, supply chains encounter complex rights issues which cause 80% of all content not to be 'rights ready', or commercially viable. While at a first glance this seems like a problem that can be addressed with off-the-shelf components, deliberate obfuscations or accidental variations in content and rights (collectively called "uncertainty"), do not allow for conventional online search tools to work well for this problem. This leads to the current situation where rights discovery for online content is a manual, error prone and cumbersome process, with substantial effort required to remain within the law, and virtually no effort (and minimum risk) for those that wish to violate copyright law. The LUCID Rights project brings together an interdisciplinary team of internationally-leading experts in machine learning, knowledge discovery, high-performance image & video engineering, copyright law, and business & content licensing models in order to address this important challenge. The key objective is to create a unique solution for rights discovery and indelible signature creation for the content properties and copyright information that will be robust to noise or uncertainty in the rights description. The confluence of standards for machine-readable contracts and compact signature generation allows for this to also be trialed within standard-compliant mechanisms, thereby enabling openness, and commercial traction within short timeframes. This will allow for the first time to apply advanced machine learning to disrupt the domain of digital content rights, thereby unlocking the potential for new markets and services within the UK and internationally.