Blockchain

MPEG Smart Contracts for Media
Webinar | Wed, March 30, 2022 | 2:00PM – 3:00PM BST
Registration and further info at: https://lnkd.in/diRBqrvY

On blockchain agnostic smart contracts for fair, timely and transparent payment of royalties to artists and rightsholders. At the 137th MPEG meeting, MPEG Systems promoted ISO/IEC 21000-23 to its final stage of development. This important standard will greatly assist the music and media industry stakeholders in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs. In this way, it also increases stakeholders trust for sharing high-value data (e.g., music rights) in the ecosystem. Join the webinar to find out on standards' role in the future of music and media industry.

The ITU has largely contributed to the field of Distributed Ledger Technology and Blockchain, ranging financial inclusion to data management. Several working groups have already provided prominent contributions to DLT standards. Some examples are SG2: Operational aspects, SG17: Security, and SG13: Networks and cloud, which have established focus groups on FG-DPM, FG-AI4EE, or FG-DLT.

The kind of outputs provided by ITU to the DLT include, but are not limited to:

• Management models, functionalities and interfaces for DLT
• Applicability of DLT in addressing international accounting, policy, regulatory and economic issues in the telecommunications/ICT domain
• Environmentally efficient solutions for DLT implementation and developing Recommendations on the sustainable use of DLTs
• Identification of standardisation gaps on the environmental performance of DLT and how to address their environmental efficiency
• DLT signalling and protocol architectures, data models and testing requirements
• Frameworks and functional requirements of DLT use cases in future networks, cloud computing and trusted network infrastructures
• Guidelines on security aspects of DLTs and specification of security requirements for various DLT use cases

For more information, refer to the ITU study groups working programmes.

ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media standard provides the means (e.g., application programming interfaces) for converting MPEG-21 XML and RDF media contracts (ISO/IEC 21000-19 Media Value Chain Ontology, ISO/IEC 21000-19/AMD1 Audio Value Chain Ontology, ISO/IEC 21000-20 (2nd Ed) Contract Expression Language and ISO/IEC 21000-21 (2nd Ed) Media Contract Ontology) to smart contracts that can be executed on existing DLT environments.

This important standard will greatly assist the media industry in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs. Such a process in turn will increase trust among the industry stakeholders for sharing data (e.g., music catalogues and associated IP rights metadata) in the ecosystem. Another important feature of this standard is that it offers the possibility to bind the clauses of a smart contract with those of a narrative contract. In this way, each party signing an MPEG derived smart contact will know exactly what the clauses stored in the smart contract express.

The latter standard has reached Draft International Standard (DIS) level at the 136th MPEG meeting, 11-15 Oct. 2021. Thus, the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG03 MPEG Systems subgroup on ‘Smart Contracts for Media’ invites all interested experts to contribute and consider joining its mailing list at https://lists.aau.at/mailman/listinfo/smart-contracts. We would welcome your input on these activities and other matters of mutual interest.

References

1. Panos Kudumakis, et. al., 'The Challenge: From MPEG Intellectual Property Rights Ontologies to Smart Contracts and Blockchains', IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, pp. 89-95, Vol. 37, Issue 2, Mar. 2020. http://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2019.2955207
2. ISO/IEC DIS 21000-23 Information technology - Multimedia framework (MPEG-21) - Part 23: Smart Contracts for Media, Oct. 2021. https://www.iso.org/standard/82527.html