Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Copyright

The folks at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) have been busy at the drawing board working on a new rights advisory and management tool. After months of tweaking and refining, the CCC is introducing Rightsphere to resolve the two-fold dilemma confronting everyone these days: how to share information and still safeguard copyright.

Distributing articles, links, and reports electronically without permission can be a real problem, no matter how users try to shield themselves behind the "I didn't know" excuse. Employees at the investment management firm of Legg Mason, for instance, discovered the hard way just where those legal boundaries started and stopped. When employees forwarded electronic copies of a newsletter among the office staff, they claimed they didn't realize that such distribution infringed on the publisher's copyright. When the court issued its final ruling, Legg Mason had to pay $20 million to the newsletter publisher for copyright infringement.

But the cost of complying with copyright and permissions isn't simply monetary. The time involved in trying to figure out what copyright permissions apply to which documents is substantial. And often, the burden of proof stacks up in the in box of corporate librarians to provide the final decision.

"CCC Rightsphere is a significant step forward in addressing the complex landscape of copyright administration faced by today's leading enterprises," said John Blossom, president of Shore Communications, Inc. "In today's enterprises, content is purchased oftentimes throughout an organization and is accessed on a global basis by highly mobile staffs. This can lead to a complex web of copyright entitlements not easily managed through traditional copyright tracking services."

The development of Rightsphere comes at a time when users are looking for quick and easy answers to copyright/permission questions, according to Bill Burger, CCC's vice president of marketing. Rightsphere cuts to the chase to provide easy answers, he said.

Rightsphere pulls copyright, licensing, and per-use permissions information into a single repository that can be accessible by employees companywide. Users can hit the Rightsphere button on the desktop, and the tool identifies the publication while pulling up the corresponding list of rights. The user simply checks off how the content will be used (e-mail, photocopies, or on the intranet), and Rightsphere answers the questions immediately. Users know exactly what permissions are available for that content. If a user needs to purchase rights, that's easily arranged by clicking on the shopping cart button for payment options.

The user-friendly page lets users maneuver through the permissions process with little or no training. The only training involved is for the rights manager who installs the licensing and permissions agreement information into the program, where it can be updated as needed.

Lynne Herndon, president and CEO of Cell Press, (a subsidiary of Elsevier, Inc.), was one of the first corporate users to test Rightsphere. She called it "a cool product" that "allows organizations to champion both content collaboration and copyright compliance at the same time." While most companies now are having difficulty organizing and identifying the rights they own and the rights they can obtain through an organization such as the CCC, she said, Rightsphere makes it easy.

To keep an eye on corporate subscription use, Rightsphere also provides reports and statistics on copyrighted materials to give information managers insights to what and how content is being used throughout the company. This information can easily be used to calculate which corporate subscriptions meet employees' needs.

"Rightsphere goes right to the heart of the fear, confusion, and complexity that stifle companies from unleashing the value of the content they obtain," said Chuck Richard, Outsell, Inc.'s vice president and lead analyst. "Rightsphere is a rights performance solution with a major productivity upside that knocks aside the logs in the corporate rights-clearing logjam."

CCC is rolling out Rightsphere at the SLAconference this month in Baltimore. For more information, visit http://www .ccc.com.