Content and Digital Asset Management

Not-for-profit rights broker and licensing expert Copyright Clearance Center has come out in support of the U.S. Copyright Office's Priorities and Special Projects report.

Hachette Book Group has struck a licensing agreement with Round Table Companies that will give Round Table access to HBG’s proprietary digital content management system for the purpose of developing an iPad app.

The first iPod was revealed quietly at a presentation by Steve Jobs on 23 October 2001 and was in stores a month later. The music industry reacted not by examining the successes of P2P and iTunes and working on their own digital music platform, but with DRM (digital rights management), restrictions that attempted to prevent the buyer from copying music.

The act of highlighting a noteworthy passage in an ebook is being socialized by Findings, an online destination where readers can collect, share, discuss and discover such highlights from ebooks and web texts. Findings’ creators, the folks at startup incubator Betaworks, refer to their creation as a “social commonplace book,” and “a platform for sharing and discovering what people are reading.” The Findings experience is centered around shared passages and user libraries.

Keynote speakers for the event are Bill Trippe, vice president and lead analyst from The Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell, Inc. and Evan Schnittman, managing director, group sales and marketing, print and digital at Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. They will focus on how e-books have generated renewed interest in content management.

Publishers and experts at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany say eBook theft is unlikely to go away, but is a manageable problem with vigilance and action already underway.

“If you give normal, regular, upstanding citizens a legitimate route to your material they are most likely to attain it legitimately, most people do not want to steal,”  said Claire Holloway of publishing services provider Bookmasters.

Rice and Duke University modellers have discovered that rather than disrupting piracy, DRM actually acts as an incentive for people to pirate music instead of buying it.

The publisher of a database chronicling historical time-zone data is claiming copyright ownership of those facts, and is suing two researchers for re-purposing it in a free-to-use database relied on by millions of computers. The data, which basically spells out past and future times anywhere in the world, is used in Java, Linux, PostgreSQL, Oracle and other programs to assign the correct time based on geographic location.

Copyright Clearance Center, a leading provider of licensing solutions, has developed an in-app licensing toolkit for RightsLink Plus- and Premium-enabled publishers to add licensing to their iPad or iPhone apps. Solution will allow knowledge workers and other professional content consumers to formally share content from mobile devices.

On September 12, 2011, the Authors Guild sued the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University over digital copies of books from their vast libraries. Many of these scanned books are no longer in print and of interest only to scholars, but the lawsuit reflects the growing tension between professional authors and the libraries that hold their work.