A digital rights aware similarity measure for multimedia documents

This paper presents a novel approach to the retrieval of multimedia documents that considers Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) metadata as a multidimensional feature in a metric space. The approach allows us to perform similarity searches on the IPR attributes of digital items and to integrate these searches in a common query-by-example paradigm. We aim at managing the metadata related to the IPR in both centralized and Peer-to-Peer systems with metric indexing capabilities. Together with content-based similarity search, IPR similarity search can help the end user to deal with a huge amount of similar items with different licenses. Moreover, content providers may be able to detect fake copies or illegal uses. Two use cases, related to the retrieval of music and images respectively, are presented to describe the possible applications of the approach.