Exercising Your Rights

Publishers of all sizes have to manage detailed and vital information about the rights they own, the rights they have sold, and the royalties they either owe or are owed. It can be a significant accounting undertaking. Especially with the burgeoning digital marketplace, book publishers are increasingly redistributing their content in any number of ways and thus, generating additional revenue––as well as the need to manage additional rights and royalties.

Fortunately, there are a number of solutions on the market today, from services that help publishers license their content to those that help automate the tracking and payments process to save time and hassle, and eliminate errors.

Services for Licensing Content

“We work with a lot of book publishers,” notes Douglas Black, public relations manager at the not-for-profit Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). CCC offers several licensing arrangements—corporate, academic and international—as well as Rightslink, a service that enables publishers to expand their rights and permissions business by offering reprints and reuse permissions to online customers.

“The annual copyright license is our most popular service,” Black adds. “… There are literally thousands of publishers participating who have consented to share rights through this program. Corporations that buy the annual license are preauthorized to use any of the content under that licensing umbrella.”

Facilitating the relationship between content providers and content users is what drove Michael O’Donnell—who had previously started CompuServe, one of the early ISPs—to found iCopyright.com.

“We found that publishers … were very interested in getting their content online, but soon realized that once it was there, it was very easy … for people to take it …,” O’Donnell says. “Publishers began to ask, ‘… How can we communicate with people that they just can’t take content and do anything they want with it? …’ I thought, well, we could build a system for that … .”