Paul Jessop

Paul Jessop is chief technology officer of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the trade association representing the international recording industry. He is responsible for the collective technical activity in the industry and works closely with the IFPI's legal department on the evolution of Internet-related legislation and their anti-piracy experts in both the online and offline worlds.

Central to the IFPI's leadership in the transition to Internet-delivery of music is the development, promotion and operation of identification schemes - International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) for tracks and the Global Release Identifier (GRid) for electronic distribution, both of which are managed by Paul's department.

Paul is a chartered engineer, a fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a member of the Audio Engineering Society and the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He has a degree in engineering and computer science from Cambridge and a post-graduate diploma in management studies from Oxford. Paul is a keen scuba diver and has held an amateur radio licence since 1975.

Synopsis

The recording industry was said to have experienced the "Perfect Storm" as peer-to-peer file trading technology and broadband penetration combined to facilitate massive theft of copyrighted content.

Now that legal services have launched successfully, will the availability of increasingly sophisticated technologies help or hinder the development of this exciting new market? In particular will Digital Rights Management deliver the great things it promises; will competing systems ever interoperate; will metadata drive consumption and who (or what) will create it?

Further, are these technologies sophisticated enough, or will they prove incapable of delivering what demanding consumers and rightsholders want?