AXMEDIS; is a huge EU funded project, officially called Automated Production of Cross Media Content for Multi-Channel Distribution. This is the third conference ; hosted by the project, which brings together various efforts from the project itself and papers in the related fields.
To be honest, the conference was not very exciting ... many of the papers that I attended did not really promote anything new, and some were hashes of existing work. That said, I must admit that I did learn a lot about the MPEG-21 standard, and I am even more convinced that it is an almost useless piece of standardisation.
That said, there was one very interesting presentation, which made it all worthwhile. Richard Owens, a director from WIPO gave a long presentation on copyright and challenges on the enfocement of copyright. It was one of the most comprehensive talks I have ever been to, and he highlighted a number of interesting points; including:
- Technology should be taken as given. Copyright law needs to be applied to technology and not the other way round.
- Automatic filtering technology (based on watermarking and fingerprinting) has to be accepted as part of the deal, and groups like the EFF are coming round to accepting this position.
- Standards could have too much patents and themselves become technological barriers
- Access to education material in development countries could become a copyright exception
He also participated in a panel on rights expression languages (where I was also a panelist). The panel however was not that exciting to be honest, although my view that there is a strong need for core formal models for REL was accepted :)
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