Rights Office:

The rights office would act for the artist, creator, or legal owner of the product rights. It would contain details about the product and 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. 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 rights office is to accept licence requests and permanently record licence office identification and the licence office local identifier against this product.

A third function would be to confirm the valid licence from then on - when, for whatever reason, the legal owner of the licence needs to confirm ownership. A valid licence would consist of a complete matching PRD and a signature check of the intellectual product itself.

In this way the rights office would hold no details of the license holder but only a reference to unique licence identification.

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

Licence Office:

The licence office acts solely for the user of the product. It records details of the users registered with it and allocates a unique licence identification when a user obtains the rights to use a product. It will send this licence code to the rights office at this time and, in exchange, will receive and store the associated 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 rights office it would 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 user as in this licence office structure. This could promote a whole new development of user rights management systems which record addition rights purchased by users in addition to the basic rights obtained in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights environment.