One of the key issues in the digitally networked world is the inability to prevent the unauthorised digital copying of content by consumers. Speed bumps may slow progress and large-scale pirates may be pursued through the courts, but widespread individual consumer copying is unlikely to diminish. While income from advertising has been seen as a viable solution, questions are emerging about whether it is developing at an appropriate pace or has the breadth to represent a comprehensive answer.

If there is market failure here, it is the inability to surface new business models that will make use of the capabilities and characteristics of the digital domain to generate long-term sustainable content businesses.

A key underlying factor is the relative paucity of data about the content moving across networks. The lack of common meta-data formats within or between sub-sectors has slowed licensing efforts and resulted in inefficiency among the many disparate systems in use. Globally, this reduces opportunities for truly unified solutions across digital content regardless of content-type, genre or medium. We believe that technological solutions to unify and make available global meta-data about all content, including commercially available, user generated, public sector and public domain/out of copyright materials, would result in many new opportunities for businesses - some as yet unknown and some more easily foreseeable.

Improved meta-data tracking would assist in simplified rights licensing processing, improve content visibility and the ability to analyse user engagement. Clearly, there is real and valid sensitivity here, regarding the privacy and security of the individual consumer. Part of the requirement for new methods and approaches in this field is the care and attention paid to users permissions or default returns to aggregated solutions in order to maintain long term, high levels of personal security and privacy.

In identifying meta-data infrastructure as a priority, we recognise the global scope of the task and the considerable volume of work that has already been undertaken, with commercial solutions already available in some areas. Our intention is not to encourage more institutions to create meta-data for their content (increasingly this is becoming part of routine production processes), but to increase interoperability between the sectors and extend value by making it richer, for example to include information about the provenance and production process, as well as the content. The goal is not to try to build a single universal repository of data (as proposed in the Gowers report) but support the standardisation and interoperability of existing databases across the Creative Industries. When combined with network infrastructures that are more capable of supporting meta-data exchange, this could enable significant new ways of driving content discovery, licensing, consumption and new, as yet undetermined, business models.

Note: Meta-data includes authorship, provenance, rights positions, pricing, ownership, distributor, aggregator and licensee data, production information and identification of how, where, when and the context of content exploitation comprehensive answer.