The answer is right in front of you

On 25 October the European Commission held a Digital Agenda Stakeholder Day at which the European Publishers Council gave one of the presentations, “The answer to the machine is in the machine”. Their project is to build an infrastructure that will pull together the various existing automated licensing systems ranging from Creative Commons to ACAP. As their press release describes:

‘In the internet age we need to be able to identify the content being used and who controls the rights in it; we need to be able to identify the user and the usage; we need to be able to read any permissions information; we need to be able automatically to link these various entities together to complete a transaction. A digital copyright symbol would be a gateway and marker for any person and any machine for all this essential information.’