A Web Ontology for Copyright Contract Management

Digitisation and the Internet carry new opportunities and threats to content markets, but traditional Digital Rights Management does not suffice to face them. The main problems are the lack of interoperability, the ignorance of user rights and implementation costs. Our proposal is to take copyright into account as a way to establish a common interoperability ground and means to incorporate user rights. It is based on a Semantic Web ontology that conceptualises the copyright domain. The ontology provides the building blocks for flexible machineunderstandable copyright contracts and facilitates their implementation because existing Semantic Web tools can be easily reused.