With the advancement of electronic commerce and the ability to replicate perfect copies of digital material over global networks, IPR owners must establish mechanisms to control how their copyright creations are exploited. This is achieved in two ways.
Firstly, by the identification of the individual IPR components of a digital creation and the management of these identifiers by persistently associating them with the digital object they identify. Please refer to Document WG11/N1918 for further information on the identification of intellectual property.
And secondly, by devising alternative protection mechanisms that are capable of controlling how content may be accessed depending upon the type of creation and the nature of their dissemination. So, for example, different types of digital material such as speech, text, images, audio, and visual, either individually or collectively, are likely to be used in a wide range of MPEG-4 applications. Different protection mechanisms, such as smart cards, cryptographic enveloping, watermarking and fingerprinting techniques are likely to be applied to protect content and new techniques will no doubt be developed and refined in the future. Please refer to WG11/N2614 for further information on the management and protection of intellectual proparty.