Use of mobile agents for IPR management and negotiation

The paper describes a model and an implementation of a system to negotiate and manage Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for the electronic commerce of multimedia products such as video sequences, photos, images, music, documents, etc. This could also be used in the context of electronic publishing services like electronic production of books or multimedia CD-ROMs. The system considers issues from the IPR negotiation phase when a copyrighted material is sold, till the control of later payments derived by rights use. The rights use defines the capabilities that an entity has in relation to authorised operations with copyrighted products. In order to represent the IPR information, metadata are used. In particular, our implementation adapts existing models for a broker based architecture. Finally, the mobile agents are used to allow brokers to collaborate in the analysis and detection of illegal use of copyrighted material.