Appendix A — CITF
This annex clarifies how the Open Music Observatory aligns with—and operationalises—the recommendations of the CITF First Project Report1. As discussed in the introduction, the CITF framework builds on the analytical findings of the Study on copyright and new technologies: copyright data management and artificial intelligence2, which identified structural weaknesses in rights metadata infrastructures across creative industries and called for interoperable, machine-readable copyright data.
Within this policy context, the Open Music Observatory was developed in the Open Music Europe Horizon Europe research and innovation action as a sectoral implementation environment. Its purpose is to test how the types of federated copyright data infrastructures envisaged by CITF can function in practice within the music ecosystem, and how they can connect to emerging European initiatives such as the EU Culture Data Hub and the Culture Compass for Europe.
Architecturally, the Open Music Observatory follows the same core logic articulated by CITF: authoritative identifiers and registries as a foundational layer; shared semantic profiles to enable interoperability across heterogeneous systems; and technical exchange mechanisms designed to preserve provenance, traceability, and auditability across the full lifecycle of works and recordings. Our contribution is therefore not the introduction of a parallel conceptual framework, but the practical testing of these principles in a highly fragmented, mixed public–private environment.
This alignment can be illustrated through our Slovak reference implementation. In that pilot, an explicit institutional agreement was established between the Slovak National Library (authority control and bibliographic stewardship), SOZA (authoritative register of musical works and authors’ rights), the Slovak Music Centre (national documentation and specialist music library, and chair of IAML Slovakia), and Reprex as a technical provider. Together, these actors covered the same functional spectrum highlighted in the first CITF project—authoritative registries, cultural heritage stewardship, and operational data integration—while embedding them in a concrete governance and workflow arrangement capable of supporting ongoing data exchange rather than one-off aggregation.
Compared to the institutional configuration described in the first CITF project, which focused primarily on the role of national libraries as trusted public anchors for copyright-relevant metadata, the Slovak pilot extended this logic by explicitly integrating collective management organisations and specialist music documentation centres into the same federated governance arrangement. This reflects a core assumption of our work: in music, authoritative copyright data cannot be operationalised without the direct participation of rights-management bodies and sector-specific intermediaries. Governance models must therefore accommodate asymmetric mandates and mixed public–private responsibilities from the outset.
The starting points of the CITF First Project Report and the Open Music Observatory are closely related, but not identical. CITF was established in response to a clearly defined policy concern: the growing inadequacy of existing copyright data infrastructures to support lawful, transparent, and trustworthy use of protected works in the digital and AI era. Its primary problem framing is horizontal and cross-sectoral, asking how copyright-relevant data—identifiers, rights management information, and provenance—can be made interoperable, machine-readable, and reliable across domains, in a context where AI training, automated reuse, and large-scale content aggregation expose structural weaknesses in existing registries.
From this perspective, CITF focuses on foundational questions: which identifiers and registries can be treated as authoritative; how provenance can be preserved across transformations; and how public institutions, in particular national libraries, can act as trusted anchors for copyright-relevant data without assuming ownership of rights or commercial workflows. The emphasis is therefore on establishing a minimal but robust horizontal infrastructure that can be reused across sectors and policy areas, rather than on optimising any single creative domain.
The Open Music Observatory emerged from a partially overlapping, but more vertically embedded problem space. Our starting point was not only the absence of trustworthy, interoperable copyright data at European level, but the accumulated failure of music-specific data infrastructures to scale in a sector characterised by extreme fragmentation, asymmetric bargaining power, and pervasive private governance. In music, the core data required for attribution, remuneration, diversity monitoring, and policy evaluation is generated primarily outside public heritage institutions—within collective management organisations, distributors, platforms, and private catalogues—and is continuously mutated through high-frequency commercial reuse.
A further point of alignment—and clarification—concerns the notion of authoritative copyright information. Both the CITF First Project Report and the Open Music Observatory start from the shared premise that, in the music sector, collective management organisations (in particular CISAC members) hold the most authoritative information on the legal status of musical and literary works, just as comparable societies do for audiovisual works. In principle, this authoritative information exists, and in many cases it is already structured around long-standing identifiers such as ISWC, IPI, ISRC, and society-specific repertoire registers.
The problem we sought to address was therefore not the absence of authority, but how to make authoritative copyright data operational across mixed public–private environments where participation is voluntary, incentives are uneven, and governance is inherently asymmetric. The Open Music Observatory was conceived as a policy-embedded implementation environment: a place to test whether the kinds of infrastructures envisaged by CITF can function in practice when they must interoperate with private registers, commercial workflows, and sector-specific documentation traditions, while remaining compatible with public-law obligations and European data governance principles.
These assumptions lead to a slightly different emphasis in implementation, while remaining fully compatible with the CITF framework. In particular, the Open Music Observatory draws explicitly on the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) to structure interoperability across legal, organisational, semantic, and technical layers. We have found this layering especially useful in a complex, multi-institutional environment such as music, where interoperability failures rarely originate at the technical level alone, but are more often rooted in misaligned mandates, incompatible workflows, or unresolved legal constraints.
In the music sector, workflow alignment necessarily precedes semantic alignment. Metadata semantics cannot be stabilised in isolation from the processes that generate, modify, and consume them. Rights registration, repertoire updates, distribution reporting, usage logging, royalty allocation, and archival ingestion each follow different institutional logics and time horizons. If these workflows are not first made visible and comparable, semantic harmonisation risks formalising inconsistencies rather than resolving them. For this reason, the Open Music Observatory places early emphasis on documenting and comparing lifecycle workflows—who records what, at which point, and under which legal authority—before attempting to impose shared semantic profiles or mappings.
This sequencing does not contradict the CITF approach; rather, it operationalises it in a domain where copyright-relevant data is generated predominantly outside the public sector. Once private actors such as collective management organisations, distributors, platforms, and labels are involved, interoperability cannot rely solely on public-law governance assumptions. Asymmetric governance becomes the norm: participants differ in mandates, incentives, data sensitivity, and legal exposure. In such settings, interoperability must be negotiated rather than prescribed.
This is why the Open Music Observatory adopts the data sharing space concept as a governance and implementation model. Data sharing spaces allow authoritative data to remain with its custodians—public or private—while enabling controlled, purpose-limited reuse through shared rules, interfaces, and provenance mechanisms. They provide a practical way to operationalise the EIF layers in environments where full centralisation or uniform compliance is neither feasible nor desirable. In our view, this makes the overall architecture more robust and future-proof, particularly for music, where lawful exploitation depends on the coordination of multiple rights and where private registers are indispensable components of the ecosystem.
Seen in this light, the Open Music Observatory does not introduce a parallel conceptual framework but demonstrates how the principles articulated by CITF can operate under real-world conditions. It shows how authoritative identifiers, semantic interoperability, and provenance-aware exchange can be realised when workflows are heterogeneous, authority is distributed, and governance is shared across public and private actors—conditions that are likely to characterise not only music, but many other cultural domains as European data spaces mature.
Interoperable, Trustworthy, and Machine-Readable Copyright Data in the AI Era: Report of the CITF First Project. (Partanen et al. 2025)↩︎
In the bibliography see (European Commission et al. 2022).↩︎