Building a Shared Rights Database Across Organizations

In short: The Noctil Platform lets rights organizations and industry partners build a shared source of truth for sound recording and musical work metadata, while each organization keeps control of the data it owns. OrgLink applies record-level and attribute-level permissions across a multi-organization hierarchy. A rules engine decides who owns each record, and ProcessEngine notifies the right parties whenever data changes. Collaborations that would take 6–12 months to build from scratch go live in under three months, with up to 68% lower operating cost.

Collaborate on rights metadata without giving up control. For PROs, CMOs, AV rights societies and industry consortia building shared sound recording, musical work and copyright owner databases.

The Situation

Across the music industry, organizations are pooling their metadata to build a shared, authoritative record. This happens in four common ways:

• Global collaborations between rights organizations that combine their repertoire data.
• Industry projects that bring together master (sound recording) and composition (musical work) metadata in one place.
• Regional rights organizations building a source of truth for the sound recordings or musical works in their territory, to improve matching and distribution efficiency.
• Shared copyright owner registries that maintain one authoritative record of rights owners and their identifiers: record labels and phonogram producers, audiovisual (AV) producers, music publishers and other copyright holders. Common identifiers include IPI and ISNI for parties, DDEX Party IDs (DPIDs) and label codes for labels, ISRC and ISWC for recordings and works, and ISAN or EIDR for audiovisual works.

Each model promises the same thing: cleaner data, fewer disputes, and faster, more accurate payments. To deliver it, many independent organizations have to contribute to, and trust, one shared dataset.

The Problem

Shared data only works if every participant trusts it. That depends on solving four hard problems at once:

• Rule-based ownership. When two organizations contribute the same musical work, ownership is set by rules the governing committee agrees. Examples include the rightsholders’ or contributors’ place of birth or citizenship, the work’s country of release, or an active mandate. These rules have to be applied consistently and automatically.
• Selective data sharing. An organization may not want to expose certain rightsholder details or split information to others, even though that same data is needed to work out ownership. The system has to use the data without revealing it.
• Change control. When data an organization owns is edited, it needs to know. When a change could alter ownership itself, the owner needs to be able to approve or reject it.
• Clear responsibility. As records change state, responsibility for reviewing and resolving them has to be assigned to the right organization, without manual coordination.

Together, these call for complex rules, permissions and notification workflows. Building them in-house is slow, costly and hard to get right, and without them the collaboration loses the trust it depends on.

The Solution

The Noctil Platform provides the multi-organization data layer, governance and workflows out of the box.

1. Flexible multi-tenant hierarchy. Organizations can be arranged as a simple parent-child structure or as a multi-level hierarchy, matching how the collaboration is actually governed.
2. OrgLink for shared data with control. OrgLink connects each organization’s accounts into one source of truth. Permissions are set at the record level and the attribute level, so an organization can share a work while keeping specific fields, such as rightsholder details or splits, private.
3. Rules engine for ownership and access. Committee-defined rules decide which organization owns each record, and which other organizations can read, write or update each part of it. Ownership is calculated from the full data, including fields that stay hidden from other participants.
4. ProcessEngine for change workflows. Noctil’s built-in workflow engine, with its notification module, alerts every relevant organization when data it owns or depends on changes. Changes that could affect ownership are sent to the owner for approval, and responsibility for review is assigned automatically.
5. Enterprise-grade security. Every action is governed by permissions and recorded, which protects ownership and data integrity across all participating organizations.

Together, OrgLink and ProcessEngine give a collaboration secure, enterprise-scale infrastructure that is ready in months rather than years.

The Result

• Live in under 3 months, compared with 6–12 months to build comparable infrastructure from scratch
• Up to 75% faster time to deploy
• Up to 68% lower operating cost, compared with a self-hosted build and an in-house admin team, across 20 deployments
• Trusted collaboration, because each organization keeps control of the data it owns and the fields it chooses to keep private
• Automatic ownership and accountability, applied consistently through committee-defined rules and change workflows