|
1. What is »Intellectual
Property« in the context of MPEG-4?
2. What is meant by »IP
Management & Protection«?
3. What is meant
by "IP Information Data Set"?
4. Will MPEG-4 standardise
specific security tools or will it provide a generic interface to utilise such
(private) tools?
5. Why is IP
Management & Protection necessary and important for MPEG-4?
6. Why can't everything be
in the clear?
7.
Will all content be copy protected in MPEG-4?
8. Who will use MPEG-4 IPMP?
9. Who will benefit from
MPEG-4 IPMP?
10.
Who will be affected by MPEG-4 IPMP?
11. What does MPEG-4
IPMP manage and protect?
12. How can the IPMP
framework contribute to license management in MPEG-4?
13. Can I have an
MPEG-4 application without any IPMP system?
14. Who
will determine whether a particular application of MPEG-4 requires an IPMP
System?
15.
Will there be a standard MPEG-4 IPMP System?
16. Is it mandatory to
use an IPMP System in MPEG-4?
17. What will be part of the
standard and what will be proprietary?
18. What kind of watermarking
system will be standardised?
19. What kind of encryption
algorithm will be standardised?
20. What kind of
authentication technologies will be stadardised?
21. What kind of public key
infrastructure technologies will be standardised?
22. What kind of digital
signature technologies will be standarised?
23. What kind of
fingerprinting technologies will be standardised?
24. What kind of conditional
access technologies will be standardised?
25. Will it be mandatory for MPEG-4
application developers to obtain a licence for an IPMP System?
26. How is this related to the work of
other standardisation bodies and for a (e.g. DAVIC, DVD, CPTWG, OPIMA,
...)?
27. How will
regulatory issues impact on MPEG-4?
28. Will it be illegal to circumvent an IPMP
System?
29. How is this
related to the work of regulatory and treaty organisations (e.g. WIPO, NAFTA,
EU, National governments, ...)?
30. Many countries
restrict the export of technology that might be utilised in IPMP systems (e.g.
cryptography). Is this an issue for MPEG-4 ?
31.
How do I architect a secure MPEG-4 application?
32. How
will I know if an IPMP System is MPEG-4 compliant?
33. Will
IPMP Systems have an impact on the performance on MPEG-4 applications?
34. Will IPMP
systems be able to provide legal proof of unauthorised use?
35. Where can I get an IPMP
System?
36. How secure is
MPEG-4 IPMP?
37. Does
the publicly standardised syntax of the IPMP Framework decrease the security of
IPMP systems ?
38. Will MPEG-4 IPMP
prevent unauthorised use (»piracy«)?
39.
When cutting and/or pasting parts of an AVO, are the IP Information Data Set
retained and are the AVO parts still protected? If parts of different AVOs are
merged, are their respective IP Information retained?
40. Can each IP Information be retrieved independently after
AVOs have been merged into a new MPEG-4 presentation (e.g. for tracking
purposes)?
41. Does
MPEG-7 require IPMP as well?
42. Will MPEG-4 IPMP systems
be able to manage and protect MPEG-7 content as well?
43. What are the
procedures and schedule for this development?
44. Who has contributed
to this development?
45. Where do I get more
information?
Intellectual property describes the efforts of creators to
produce works, including ideas, information, inventions and expressions that
may be manifested in digital content. Such creative material has a measurable
value and these are generally expressed as "rights". The Intellectual Property
Right (IPR) is the legal authority afforded by copyright protection defined by
national, and increasingly, international, legislation, granted to creators and
their appointed agents.
IPR generally bestows on its owners the right to exclude others
(with certain limited exceptions) from the use or re-use of their intellectual
property without a licence from the IPR owner. Any intellectual property which
is delivered, either freely or for commercial gain, through an MPEG-4
application is afforded such protection.
2. What is
meant by IP "Management & Protection"?
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.
3. What is meant by "IP Information Data
Set"?
In Question 2, the identification of IP has been mentoned. This
information is provided by the so-called "IP Information Data Sets" (IPI Data
Sets) that can be associated with each audio-visual object.
4. Will
MPEG-4 standardise specific security tools or will it provide a generic
interface to utilise such (private) tools?
MPEG-4 IPMP will standardise a generic interface to (possibly
private) IPMP tools. This interface is referred to as the IPMP interface.
5. Why is IP Management
& Protection necessary and important for MPEG-4?
Without an adequate system to manage information about digital
creations and to control their accessibility through content protection, IPR
owners will be unwilling to allow their assets to be delivered through MPEG-4
applications.
Giving the confidence to IPR owners, such as film producers and
record companies, that they can make available their vast catalogues of
valuable creative material securely across new digital markets is critical to
ensure the commercial success of the MPEG-4 standard.
6. Why
can't everything be in the clear?
Clear content describes digitized creative material in a natural
state that requires no private key or smart card to access it and contains no
embedded information to identify its source. For those owners of IP who wish to
control the use of their creative material, the IPMP system provides a
framework to protect content within the domain of an MPEG-4 application. As
described above this can be achieved by using different IPMP Systems which
range in their level of sophistication and which are capable of rejecting
cleartext content introduced to the MPEG-4 bit stream without the proper level
of authority.
7. Will
all content be copy protected in MPEG-4?
The IPMP architecture in MPEG-4 recognizes that not all MPEG-4
applications may wish to utilize an IPMP system to provide content protection.
Therefore it will be possible to build an MPEG-4 application using MPEG-4
profiles which are not copy protected. It is not within the scope of the MPEG-4
standard to enforce the use of copy protection. This is quite clearly the joint
responsibility of the developers and manufacturers of MPEG-4 applications and
devices and the representatives of the creative industries.
8. Who will use
MPEG-4 IPMP?
Any individual and organization with responsibility for the
distribution of digital material with an intellectual property content is
likely to want to use MPEG-4 IPMP. There are many examples, such as the
distribution of audio-visual material on both digital networks (for broadcast,
narrowcast and web cast) and physical media such as DVD.
Manufacturers and developers of hardware and software devices
must work in collaboration to specify the type of mechanism which is best
suited to protect the digital content to be made available. Most important,
MPEG-4 devices which use IPMP must be capable of both detecting and rejecting
content which does not comply with the specific content protection mechanism
being applied.
It is important, however, to understand that the real management
and protection of intellectual property will be done by non standardised IPMP
systems that use the IPMP part of MPEG-4 to perform their task. Refer to
Question 15 and
further for more details.
9. Who
will benefit from MPEG-4 IPMP?
Many individuals and organizations will benefit from MPEG-4
IPMP. Most physical commerce relies on the principle that people are good
willed and wish to acquire goods in a legal manner. This principle must be
extended into the world of electronic commerce.
IPR owners are entitled to receive some recompense for
distributing digital creations that have a commercial value and consumers are
entitled to access them in return for a reasonable fee. IPMP is the framework
to support the supply and demand of intellectual property through applications
based on a standard that is capable of playing a significant role in the
electronic delivery chain.
10. Who
will be affected by MPEG-4 IPMP?
When an MPEG-4 IPMP system is properly applied within a specific
domain it can provide an effective means of preventing the unauthorised use of
intellectual property. But, perhaps more importantly, it can prevent the
illegal distribution of copyright digital material to a wide group of users if
the available content is protected and access can only be achieved by the
applicable MPEG-4 IPMP system.
11.
What does MPEG-4 IPMP manage and protect?
An IPMP system manages the level of access to protected digital
material that may made available through an MPEG-4 application. This may be to
protect to value of the digital material. However, it may that the material has
no intrinsic value but it must still be protected to preserve various rights of
privacy.
Where it is required, MPEG-4 IPMP can be used by IPR owners to
protect information about the creations which they own within an IP
Identification Data Set (please refer to Documents WG11/N1918 and WG11/2614 for
further information) stored within the scene descriptors associated with each
digital object. This information is a critical tool for IPR owners to interface
with Electronic Copyright Management Systems to facilitate automated
transactions such as the monitoring and tracking of usage.
12.
How can the IPMP framework contribute to license management in MPEG-4?
MPEG-4 does not address specifics related to methods and
practices of IP management. It simply provides a generic framework for the
delivery of information related to this. The specifies are left to the
authoring party and its representatives.
The IPMP framework can also be used to deliver information
related to the management of patent rights associated with an executable in the
MPEG-4 terminal. The format and processing related to this are not MPEG-4
issues. They are left to implementation and the non-normative IPMP systems. The
IPMP framework is an ideal delivery vehicle for IP management information to
the extent that such technology is needed for this process.
13. Can I have an
MPEG-4 application without any IPMP system?
Yes. It is quite likely that there will be a need to develop
applications based on a subset of MPEG-4 profiles which do not require IP
management and protection. Even if rules were defined within the standard to
force implementers to introduce an IPMP system they would be impossible to
enforce. However, there is a risk that content which is secure in a protected
domain can become vulnerable to misuse if it is introduced into an unprotected
domain. Application developers must convince IPR owners that reasonable
mechanisms exist to guard against such loopholes in their system design.
14. Who
will determine whether a particular application of MPEG-4 requires an IPMP
System?
It is anticipated that the owners of the content (or
representatives of these owners) will set requirements that need to be
fulfilled. Furthermore, the rights owners will only allow inject their content
to be introduced into systems in which they have confidence that their
requirements are met.y are confident to meet their requirements.
15. Will there be a
standard MPEG-4 IPMP System?
No. Since the requirements for the management and protection of
intellectual property are diverse, although IPMP Systems will use the
standardised IPMP interface, it is likely that there will be a variety of IPMP
systems existing used for different applications.
16. Is
it mandatory to use an IPMP System in MPEG-4 ?
No. If the decision is made that a particular MPEG-4 based
application will need to manage valuable IP then the designers of that
application will need to design protection mechanisms consistent with that
value. The designers may choose to design their own IPMP system or they may
choose to use an IPMP system designed for another, possibly related domain.
17. What
will be part of the standard and what will be proprietary?
The syntax and semantics of the IPMP descriptors will be
standardised but the workings of the IPMP system will not. That system may be
proprietary or not but it will not be standardised.
18. What
kind of watermarking system will be standardized?
19. What kind of
encryption algorithm will be standardized?
20. What kind of authentication
technologies will be standardized?
21. What kind of public key
infrastructure technologies will be standardized?
22. What kind of digital
signature technologies will be standardized?
23. What kind of
fingerprinting technologies will be standardized?
24. What kind of
conditional access system will be standardized?
None. The choice of any of the aforementioned technologies is
application dependant. It may be that application domains that make use of
MPEG-4 and the IPMP framework may standardise many of these pieces including
the particular IPMP System These technologies, however, can be used when
designing an IPMP system.
25. Will it be
mandatory for MPEG-4 application developers to obtain a licence for an IPMP
System?
If the application being designed has need of an IPMP System and
the designers deem it necessary to use a proprietary IPMP system, the
developers may find it necessary to licence this system. This licence will be
an issue between the developers of the application and the developers (owners)
of the IPMP System.
26. How is this related
to the work of other standardisation bodies and for a (e.g. DAVIC, DVD, CPTWG,
OPIMA, ...)?
As stated before, MPEG-4 may be used in these other standards
and if so, the IPMP framework may be adopted to protect the MPEG-4 streams.
These standards may then choose to adopt more stringent requirements on the
particulars of the IPMP system to be used.
27. How
will regulatory issues impact on MPEG-4?
MPEG-4 is a technology standard. Regulatory issues surrounding
the use of this technology will surely arise. Regulatory controls which impact
on MPEG-4 implementations and applications must be reflected by those
responsible for their implementation
28. Will it be illegal to
circumvent an IPMP System?
This depends on the legislation of the country you are in. In
many cases new legislation is being introduced to control and restrict the
modification of systems designed to manage and protect intellectual property.
29. How is this
related to the work of regulatory and treaty organisations (e.g. WIPO, NAFTA,
EU, National governments, ...)?
Such organisations establish the legal environment in which IPMP
systems will operate. A well designed non-normative IPMP system will provide
for the differing requirements of various legal systems.
30.
Many countries restrict the import, export and/or use of technology that might
be utilised in IPMP systems. Is this an issue for MPEG-4?
Clearly there are regulatory issues such as the import and
export of cryptographic algorithms which might impact upon the design on an
MPEG-4 system. It is therefore essential that anyone considering the
implementation of an MPEG-4 system should take expert legal advice on this
matter.
Applications
31.
How do I architect a secure MPEG-4 application?
The first step in design of secure MPEG-4 application is to
review the IPMP material. The primary document is the MPEG-4 Systems Standard.
Integrating secure applications into the IPMP framework is straightforward. The
MPEG-4 IPMP system has flexibility that is intended to minimise the effort of
bringing current IPMP designs into the MPEG environment. The IPMP system
provides several data channels that can be used to transport IPMP data such as
cryptographic key and signatures.
32. How
will I know if an IPMP System is MPEG-4 compliant?
The only requirement for MPEG compliance is conformance to the
bit stream syntax specified in the standard. The IPMP system would need to obey
the syntax specified in the IPMP proposal. If your system obeys the syntax as
specified in MPEG-4 IPMP, your system will be compliant. The MPEG community
will release a verification model that may be used to test your application for
bit stream compliance at a later date.
All cryptographic operations, authentication procedures, and
other specific security methods are not standardised in MPEG-4. As such, these
operations are proprietary to the external IPMP application.
33. Will
IPMP Systems have an impact on the performance on MPEG-4 applications?
A well designed IPMP system will have no impact on the
performance of an MPEG-4 application. The processing requirements and latencies
of most cryptographic algorithms are quite low. Relative to the audio and video
rendering algorithms in MPEG, this additional processing will be minimal. A
primary design concern is the synchronisation with cryptographic decoders.
34. Will IPMP
Systems be able to provide legal proof of unauthorised use?
The ability to identify a violation of authorised use is
dependent on the external IPMP system implementation. IPMP Systems can be
designed to provide evidence that would be useful in a legal proceeding.
However, the admissibility and legal use of this data is dependent on the
jurisdiction. IPMP Systems could provide traceability and persistent content
identification. These options can be used to identify illegal material and
potentially trace that material back to it's source.
35. Where can
I get an IPMP System?
Several IPMP system developers will be providing solutions based
on the MPEG-4 IPMP framework. The solutions will address particular vertical
markets as well as providing generic IPMP solutions.
You can also look at
the IPMP Applications Document (not yet existing) to get examples of IPMP
implementations.
36. How secure is
MPEG-4 IPMP?
MPEG-4 only provides an interface to non normative IPMP Systems.
Therefore, the security of MPEG-4 IPMP depends mainly on the particular IPMP
Systems used by a particular application. Since IPMP requirements differ widely
amongst various MPEG-4 applications, it is unlikely that a single IPMP System
will be able to satisfy the requirements of all applications. This will result
in the use of multiple IPMP systems to manage and protect various MPEG-4
applications. For this reason, a minimalist interface approach was chosen. It
is anticipated that application domains having some specific IPMP requirements
may specify particular IPMP systems.
37. Does the
standardiszed syntax of the IPMP Framework decrease the security of IPMP
systems?
No. The security relies on the design of the IPMP system, not
the IPMP syntax.
38. Will MPEG-4 IPMP
prevent unauthorised use (»piracy«)?
It is definitely the intention and hope that MPEG-4 IPMP will
allow flexible dynamic and secure management and protection of content.
MPEG-4 IPMP can achieve a great deal in combating piracy, but it is only one
step, which must be supported by further steps in domain specific standards
bodies, consortia, industry agreements and legislation.
39. When cutting and/or pasting parts of
an object, are the IP Information Data Set retained and are the object's parts
still protected? If parts of different objects are merged, are their respective
IP Information retained?
Not automatically. The editing system in question must support
this functionality. This is not a matter for MPEG to enforce. It is supported
however, because the author/editor can find the IPMP related data and copy it
to the newly created object. Enforcing him to do this is no role of a
standardisation body such as MPEG.
In principle, it is possible to protect objects so that IP
information cannot be stripped. The counterpart of such content could be a
"safe" editing system that enforces some IPMP rules and also outputs protected
content. Only such an editing system could read and modify the objects and use
them for creating new content. This could even be rule based, so that some
things are allowed and some things are not. The content (i.e., protected MPEG-4
audio-visual objects) would not editable in other editing systems.
It is important to point out, however, that creating such
environments is again not something that MPEG should or even can do.
40. Can each IP Information be retrieved
independently after objects have been merged into a new MPEG-4 presentation
(e.g. for tracking purposes)?
If you keep the objects comming from different sources as
different AVOs in the new MPEG-4 presentation, you can easily retain the
information.
Alternatively, you can create some new objects, apply for a
unique number (e.g. ISAN) and store the IP Information in the ISAN database and
put the ISAN number into the IP Information Data Set associated with the newly
created AVO..
Still alternatively, you could use multiple IP
Identification Data Sets, which can apply to one Elementary Stream.
41. Does
MPEG-7 require IPMP as well?
Yes. Whoever creates MPEG-7 meta-information has created
intellectual property. This implies that such a person has the same rights as a
composer does over his musical creation. Hence the argumentation from the first
section of this FAQ applies as well for MPEG-7 as it does for MPEG-4.
42. Will
MPEG-4 IPMP Systems be able to manage and protect MPEG-7 content as well?
MPEG-7 is in its early stages of standardization. It is still
unclear how the meta-information will be represented in MPEG-7. Therefore it is
too early to give an authoritative answer to this question.
43.
What are the procedures and schedule for this development?
The IPMP work has been done in the scope of the upcoming new
multimedia standard MPEG-4. The work was started in late 1996 and lead to the
possibility to identify individual Elementary Streams within MPEG-4 using
international standard numbering schemes such as the International Standard
Recording Code (ISRC), International Standard Work Code (ISWC) etc.
The management and protection of IP will as well as the
identification are a part of MPEG-4 Systems, which became an International
Standard in January 1999.
44.
Who has contributed to this development?
The IPMP framework was devised in close co-operation of
representatives of various creative industries and engineers that deal with the
development of secure multimedia distribution systems. It has always been a
major part on the MPEG IPMP work to find a common understanding between the
representatives of the creative industries (who set the requirements) and the
engineers (who are responsible to implement these requirements into technical
solutions).
45. Where do
I get more information?
To find more information on the MPEG work you can always visit
the official MPEG homepage at http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/.
A General
overview over the MPEG-4 IPMP framework can be found in the Systems Overview
Document for MPEG-4 and in the Systems part of MPEG-4. For further information
on IP Information, please refer to Document N1918, for further information on
the Management & Protection of IP please refer to the IPMP Overview
document.
To learn more about MPEG-4 IPMP, you can also write to the MPEG
IPMP Reflector (mpeg4ipmp@iis.fhg.de).
|