Managing intellectual property in a music fruition environment

With the advent of the digital age and the spread of portable digital audio players, interest in software and hardware tools that can help producers and distributors enhance and revive their catalogue of music has progressively increased. One of the main concerns of major labels is how to prevent file sharing. An innovative approach that couples reviving catalogues with support for rights management could provide an experience of multimedia content in which users select multiple media streams on the fly in a fully synchronized environment. Because this kind of user experience can't be reconstructed from the single original streams, illegal copying would be intrinsically discouraged. In this article, the authors propose an approach to encode contents and build advanced multimodal interfaces that protect intellectual property. As a case study, they use the IEEE 1599--an international standard for music description.