An internet service for content licensing and reuse, used by huge publishers like the Associated Press, Reuters, and UPI.

The Client

Their Challenge

Seattle's iCopyright Inc. needed to update its award-winning Instant Clearance Service. The new system needed to continue to offer instant licensing services on any of the millions of articles already available — but needed to offer new services and tools, to handle more traffic, to integrate with third-party service providers, and to run on a simpler, less expensive technology stack. iCopyright turned to Ideograph LLC to architect and implement a solution.

Our Solution

Ideograph engineers designed a new system from scratch, using Java and Python on top of PostgreSQL on Linux — at considerable operational cost savings.

A custom model-view-controller architecture using POJO and JSP on Tomcat provides the presentation layer; Hibernate is used as the object-relational mapping middleware. Apache serves up static content for performance, as the service gets some twenty million hits a day. Users, publishers, service providers, and administrators all have different webapps for interacting with the system. Existing publishers' licensing tags are honored, and two new tagging technologies open up Conductor to a host of new publishers. Finally, performance is vastly increased, with speed improvements of up to ten times.

Conductor was a nominee for the 2006 Software & Information Industry Association's Codie Award for Best Digital Rights Management Software.