Exercising Your Rights

iCopyright.com facilitates a number of relationships between content owners and content users. “It’s very time-consuming and bothersome for publishers to handle somewhat routine permissions requests. So, the first group of services that we provide are automatic permission grants …,” says O’Donnell. The company also provides instant licensing services and handles custom licensing requests.

iCopyright.com earns a commission percentage on closed deals, which O’Donnell says is typically between 5 percent and 10 percent, which it uses to cover its operating expenses. There are some modest fees to publishers, but says O’Donnell, “For more than 90 percent of our publishing partners, we’re sending them checks; they don’t owe us anything.”

One of the first questions O’Donnell fields from publishers is, “How much money can I make by licensing my content?” The answer is largely dependent on variables such as: the type and amount of content published; brand recognition; audience; click-thru and sell-thru rates; types of licenses offered; and pass-along value of the content, among others. “Once we know these variables, we can project how much revenue a publisher is likely to earn,” O’Donnell suggests.

Saving Time and Relationships

“… If you send out a royalties statement or payment that’s incorrect, your contributors will likely be pretty upset,” quips Linda Reiss, director of sales for solutions provider Vista International. “… It’s critical that when they gain an author, they can support and retain the relationship.”

The Media Services Group Ltd. (MSGL) has four technologies that help publishers manage rights and royalties. Taking the best-of-breed capabilities of each of its three legacy systems, MSGL has spent years, according to Dan Pelligrini, director of corporate marketing, developing a brand-new application, Élan Rights & Royalties, which he says “is feature-rich.” “We’re even able to help publishers do things like manage fractional royalties and aggregate content,” he notes. “They can sell songs or recipes or other types of media and content—or they can build compilations and track the contracts for all the elements.”