Abstract: The successful development of digital production content within a development organization requires that the intellectual property rights of the multiple elements of digital content introduced into the digital production content. According to the invention there is provided a means of automatically identifying the source, licenses and other associated intellectual property information associated with the digital content introduced. The invention providing for the direction of a dynamic search engine according to metadata relating to the digital content produced, wherein the digital content introduced is not identified within existing databases of intellectual properties indexed according to digital content. Further the invention provides for interfacing the dynamic search engine with a web crawler to data mine a region of the World Wide Web around the location of the digital content introduced determined by the dynamic search engine.

Abstract: A system and method for documenting intellectual property ownership of digital content is described. The approach includes initializing an annotation, within or associated with the digital content, within a system with a reliable reference of authorship, ownership, and licensure to a first portion of the digital content and unverified claims of authorship, ownership, and licensure to a second portion of digital content. The invention also provides a system and method to augment and update these records by adding additional claims of ownership, authorship, and licensure over time or amending them based upon interactions with centralized repositories of digital content. The system and method also provide for determining the confidence in the ownership of the digital content.

Abstract: A method of automatically tracking the introduction of external digital content into digital content under development is provided. First digital content of a digital content developer is provided. Into the first digital content is inserted from a system external to systems of the digital content developer external digital content of a party other than the digital content developer. Introduction of the external digital content into the first digital content is automatically detected and data relating to a source of the external digital content or to licensing information relating to the external digital content is stored.