Author Rights Office (ARO):

The author rights office will act for the artist, creator, or legal owner of the intellectual product. It will contain details of the product, the owner and a copy of the product. The recorded details should be sufficient to uniquely identify the product and the owner and, possibly, subject to relevant international treaties, could be the official rights record – the point where the intellectual product is published and ‘fixed’ in a tangible form. It is possible that a unique Product Identification code could also be used or applied but this is not essential for effective operation of the DIPR system.

The second function of the author rights office is to accept requests for the allocation of consumer rights to the product and permanently record consumer rights office identification and the consumer rights office local identifier against this product. The structure of these identifiers is defined later.

A third function would be to confirm the valid registered-right from then on – when, for whatever reason, the legal owner of the identified product needs to confirm ownership. A valid registered-right would consist of a complete matching Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) and copy of the intellectual product itself.

In this way the author rights office would hold no details of the consumer, only a reference to a unique identification.

The author rights office functions could be performed as part of a more extensive Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) that would handle all additional rights or licensing requests for the intellectual product.

Consumer Rights Office (CRO):

The consumer rights office acts solely for the user, or consumer, of the product. It records details of the consumers registered with it and allocates unique licence identification when a user obtains the rights to use a product. It will send this licence identification to the author rights office at this time and, in exchange, will receive and store the associated author rights office identification. It might also receive the product identification, if one exists, and might eventually provide a complete rights database for the user and therefore would also receive further rights information.

As with the author rights office, the consumer rights office will confirm this registration upon request so that the user can establish ownership.

As far as I know there is no equivalent of an ECMS that acts uniquely for the consumer as in this consumer rights office structure. This could promote a whole new development of consumers rights management systems which record supplementary rights purchased by users in addition to the basic identified rights obtained in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights environment.