Like every ISO standard, ISAN is voluntary. However, specific organizations can choose to require ISAN within their business or regulators can impose ISAN in some sectors to stimulate the adoption of a standard identifier for the general interest.

The high guaranties that ISAN offers in terms of efficiency, precision, cost, multilateral governance and openness, are main reasons why an increasing number of stakeholders and regulators are requiring ISAN:

• CMOs in Europe (France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland,…) require the ISAN for royalties payements.
• Film funding organisations require ISAN for the audiovisual projects they finance as in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, South Korea, Australia, …

ISAN registration have notably been made mandatory for all projects and works supported by the French CNC as of January 1st, 2017.

• Since January 2017, ISAN is mandatory by law in Switzerland ( 24 sec. 3bis Swiss Film Act) when reporting the exploitation of audiovisual content on home video (DVD, Blu-ray, EST…) and video on demand (VoD, S-VoD, …). This obligation applies to all local and foreign companies that distribute domestic and foreign audiovisual productions in Switzerland. ISAN is for example compulsory in the iTunes Swiss store as from Aug. 1^st 2017 (such ISAN are de facto available in all other local iTunes stores where the content is distributed).

• The communication of the European Commission “Promoting a fair, efficient and competitive European copyright-based economy in the Digital Single Market” (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/promoting-fair-efficient-and-competitive-european-copyright-based-economy-digital-single-market ) outlines the work the commission has engaged for the full interoperability of ISAN and EIDR and informs that it will propose the use of an interoperable common standard identifier as a requirement for the support through the EU MEDIA programme as from 2018.