The new operating system, active in several countries of Latin America for the declaration of works, as well as for the collection and distribution, was presented live at the 1st. AVACI Annual Congress
Last Wednesday June 9, during the First Congress of AVACI – Audiovisual Authors International Confederation –, Daniel Di Napoli, Systems Director of DAC – Directors Argentina– and developer of the new AVSYS Operating System, made a live presentation, through the Zoom platform, with simultaneous translation into six languages. This system will be distributed internationally by AVACI, free of charge, in order to promote the integration of works worldwide, through the local registry of a database concerning Audiovisual Authors and their works around the world, to centralize the information for collection, to identify Audiovisual Authors and the societies they belong to, and to view their works, among other functions. At the same time, the system is available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.
Sharing his screen with the other attendants, Di Napoli defined AVSYS as “an integrated system that allows, all societies, to make arrangements for authors’ rights” and explained that the development of tools was performed taking into account the technical recommendations published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The main functions of this operating system, Di Napoli explained, are the management of repertoires, the processing and identification of the audiovisual works’ broadcastings on television or on on demand platforms, the calculation of the broadcasting values according to the distribution rules of each society, the management of payments, reports and statistics, as well as the different indicators AVSYS may display in order to, for example, certify ISO standards. AVSYS “is specially designed for the management of audiovisual works’ rights” and it is scalable, meaning that, upon the development of a new function, all the users will have it immediately available in the system. On the other hand, AVSYS is an open source system. This means that the societies with skilled technical staff can develop functions of their own, which can also be shared with the rest of the community.
Moreover, Di Napoli explained the function of the “Video Log” and “Matching Tool” modules. Video Log allows the multiplex recording of a large number of analogue television signals simultaneously, recording the image transmitted with the date, time and signal name, which is crucial for verification tasks regarding the broadcastings of audiovisual works. In turn, Matching Tool specializes in the recognition of works, using a series of algorithms to identify, within the broadcasting playlists, the works managed by the user society. To do this, the tool crosses the data entered by the provider with the international codes available in the platforms. Such data (original title, Authors’ names, year of production, performers, etcetera) may or may not be available, depending on the country and on the platform.
The AVSYS module to declare works online enables to perform, easily and in a few steps, a complete site to declare Audiovisual Works. For such reason, it contains default templates, which can be adjusted by each society according to the needs of their region. Similarly, the system allows to upload text files in a very simple way, but it also enables to upload web services in order to integrate other systems with the AVACI database. Soon, a new mobile version, called AVSYS Mobile, will be available.
Di Napoli also presented the AVACI Database, an international database with records from Audiovisual Directors, Screenwriters and Producers: “the information of Works, Authors and collective management societies that represent them is included. Its main purpose is to simplify the exchange of repertoires among collective management societies”.
The live demonstration followed each of these steps, from the login, the language selection and subscription up to how to perform the declaration of a work, view the works receiving tray and classify it by status, and custom the system so that the user may filter and view what he/she is interested in, setting priorities according to the user’s needs. At the same time, it displayed the management of the database and how this allows to view the works recorded by an Author or society, their contact references and the societies representing them; and to filter in dozens of categories, such as date of birth or of death, member number, profession, country, name recorded in IMDb, pseudonyms, etcetera.
The creation of this operating system and its free international distribution represent a historic and essential contribution for the management of the rights of Audiovisual Authors.