Rights and royalty management in digital media are often complex, imprecise, slow, and costly. Creators frequently upload their work across various platforms but struggle to receive fair compensation, and user-generated content often lacks protection. Recent laws have shifted the burden onto online platforms. Nevertheless, these service providers often lack the essential data to fulfill their responsibilities effectively.
Valunode
Data register for digital content rights
Digital Rights
Finished
At the time of carrying out this project, Accelerate had a wider goal of supporting public/private partnerships, which later evolved to a more narrow focus on unlocking new markets by overcoming regulatory barriers.
Introduction
Problem
The digital media industry, valued at €1,070 billion annually, suffers from an uneven distribution of revenue. Retailers receive a disproportionately large share, while producers see much less. As the global legislative landscape strives to recalibrate this imbalance, the current rights and royalty management systems remain woefully inadequate. The current rights and royalty management systems do not adequately support creators or provide transparent and efficient means of managing digital content rights.
Solution
Valunode is developing an open infrastructure for declaring and discovering digital content rights. This system aims to provide real-time, affordable access to a reliable, comprehensive, and interoperable public data register.
By creating a distributed rights register independent of specific business models, sectors, and jurisdictions, the system will allow stakeholders to easily access and manage trusted rights data. This will enable fairer and more transparent remuneration for creators and efficient management of digital media.
End Goal
The project aims to establish a national copyright infrastructure in Estonia that will enhance the recovery, resilience, and growth of the Estonian creative industries.
Since relevant copyright issues have already been resolved in Estonia, we can offer a solution that allows, through e-residency, to connect to the country’s system. This infrastructure will strengthen Estonia’s leadership in digital infrastructure, attract creative entrepreneurs and e-residents, and encourage investment from producers and service providers, as copyright data will be brought to Estonia.
Outcome
The experiments conducted under the name Digiciti from April 2021 to March 2022 led to the development of a minimum viable product, which integrated Estonian copyright systems with the streaming program Fairmus.
Following this, work began with the European Commission on the Musika Peripherika project to create a pan-European standard for digital copyrights.
Valunode, is currently partnering with TRACE4EU, a consortium co-funded by Digital Europe, to concretise a service infrastructure ensuring the traceability of digital rights. An MVP is set to be achieved by the summer of 2025.
