Before starting this page I must warn the reader that MPEG-7 has more elements of abstractness, compared to previous MPEG standards that may make reading it more difficult than other pages. With this warning, let’s start from some definitions that will hopefully facilitare understanding of the MPEG-7 standard. Element Definition Examples…
MPEG-7 Development
The Life in ISO page tells about my efforts in overcoming the many obstacles on the road to establishing Subcommittee 29 (SC 29), because of the “lupissimus” nature of the organisations operating under the ISO folds, and make it the video, audio, multimedia and hypermedia coding SC. I did this…
Machines Begin To Understand The World
The increased dependency of many users, particularly on mobile devices, has initiated an unstoppable drive, supported by their increasing interaction and processing capability, to pack more functionalities in those devices. In some cases the functionality is entirely confined within the device, but in other cases the ability to interact with…
The Impact Of MPEG-7
Metadata are an important ingredient for any business strategy in the media field, both at the industry and individual company level. At the industry level this can be seen from the large number of initiatives that have developed or are still in the process of developing metadata standards, because it is…
A World Of Peers
My sudden, although not unplanned, departure from DAVIC gave me the opportunity to realise some ideas I had been mulling over since some time. With MPEG and DAVIC I had dealt with machines that process data in a sophisticated, well-programmed way, but as intermediaries between humans or, at most, between…
Technology Challenging Rights
Rights to anything are defined by the public authorities of a country in which the thing is located. Rights to a literary or artistic work are no different and can only apply to works in a particular country. As this did not promote commerce, in 1886 the Berne Convention for…
Opening Content Protection
MP3 has shown that the combination of technology and user needs can create mass phenomena behaving like a hydra. For every head of the MP3 hydra that is cut by a court sentence, two new heads appear. How to fight the MP3 hydra, then? Some people have fought it with…
Technology, Society and Law
When radio and television broadcasting were introduced, it was reasonable to expect that physical forms of distribution would eventually disappear. Why should people pay for something when the same thing is available for free over the air? This down-to-earth consideration, however, turned out to be wrong, because people listening to…
The World After MP3
MP3 has shown how the expectations of rights holders concerning the use of digital content clash with those of billions of end users. In this chapter I would like to summarise the views from the perspective of the different players. I will classify the attitudes in four categories: philosophical, technological, political…
MPEG-21 Development
After the memorable achievement of the PD 1.0 specification, I tried hard to convince SDMI people that the group should work on developing interoperable specifications that included specific technologies beyond the screening ones, or the entire initiative would be meaningless. My efforts were in vain and, at the Los Angeles…