INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11/N842
Klagenfurt, Austria, July 2006

Title:	Introducing the MPEG-2 Copyright Identifier
Source:	Systems
Editor:	Niels Rump
Status:	Approved

1 Overview

MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818) contains two tools for the Identification as well as the Protection of (copyright on) content: For purposes of copyright notification, there is the copyright descriptor. Individual streams as well as collections of streams forming a program can be identified as containing copyrighted material. The copyright can be signalled at the Audio or Video level, but also (as a collection) at the Systems Level.

For enabling protection, there are similar provisions, which can be used to signal whether particular packets have been scrambled; to send messages to be used in (proprietary) Conditional Access systems; and to identify the Conditional Access System used.

2 Two Elements of the Copyright Descriptor

The copyright descriptor consists of two parts:

A unique copyright identifier of four bytes (i.e. four ASCII characters), which identifies the type of the identifier. This number points to an authority thgoverns the identification of the content type in question. Each such governing authority defines the syntax and semantics for ‘its’ identifiers;
The content identifier — as specified by the governing authority — itself. The identifier can vary in length.

ISO/IEC 13818 also establishes the requirements of a Registration Authority for registering the copyright identifiers.