Q&A with Ed Colleran, Copyright Clearance Center
Jinfo Blog

12th February 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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During January's Software & Information Industry Associations' Information Industry Summit (IIS - http://www.siia.net/iis/2010/), VIP Magazine had an opportunity to speak with publishers, technology vendors, and content buyers. A series of brief interviews explore innovation in the information industry and how publishers are working to meet the needs of today's enterprise content buyers. Ed Colleran is the senior director of international relations for Copyright Clearance Center, the world's largest provider of copyright licensing solutions. Ed oversees strategic initiatives focused on CCC’s international activities—specifically, providing publishers around the world with new content licensing solutions and revenue-generating initiatives based on CCC’s products and services. Ed also provides the vision for the advancement of CCC’s digital rights management services and is a key contributor on other long-term strategic issues facing the information industry. VIP: What are the emergent international rights issues that CCC is anticipating for the year ahead? EC: I think one of the biggest topics is that rights holders really have to figure out how to cope with national rights in a world where there really aren’t any boundaries to people sharing content. They have to figure out how to manage their rights, acquire their rights, and be able to disperse those rights, disperse that content, all while trying to pay attention to the national laws as content is being spread around the world. VIP: Do you see publishers trying to more actively figure out where their content is being used? Content sharing and social media sharing has been a major topic during this conference. EC: Our motto really isn’t to police, but to enable copyright sharing. What we find is the more diverse tools we can offer to allow easier sharing of content, the more people will comply. We and our sister reproduction rights organisations as well as publishers are just trying to offer as many tools as they can to help to allow the legal sharing of content. Ultimately people are good at heart. They want to do the right thing, and we help. And we’ve done a lot of research directly at CCC and through organisations like Outsell that found that knowledge workers are really sharing a lot of content. They’re sharing something like seven pieces of content a day. But not a large percentage of them know that they need to get copyright permission and some think the permission kind of follows the content. That whoever purchased the information within the organisation has taken care of that; but sometimes they haven’t. So another part of what we and other rights organisations do is education, to make sure that people know what the right thing to do is. VIP: Recently on the LiveWire blog there's been a great deal of conversation about the decision by the UK's Newspaper Licensing Agency(NLA) to charge for links (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27815). What's your take on this development? EC: It's funny because while I was sitting in the session today I got some information that NLA has actually decided to stop charging for these links through their service eClips temporarily because an organisation has gone to the Copyright Tribunal in the UK to challenge them, so that’s fresh in. But we have a great relationship with NLA. We’ve worked with them for years and I actually think the model is pretty slick. Because what they’re doing is, they charge their customers to access news clip; they send a link to the customer, the customer links back to the NLA database, and they access the content from the NLA database since all the newspapers that the NLA represents download their content nightly into the NLA database. That enables the NLA to actually track every single clip that’s being accessed by their customers and they can report that back to the newspapers, so they have real information on what’s being shared. And they do charge for that. So I don’t know, as it’s been on the blogs and everything, I guess they are charging for links, but it is a little bit more complex than that. As far as I know all of the links that the NLA is actually sharing are links of member newspapers, those that have bought into the organisation. And both the newspapers pay to be in this (through a royalty share) and so do the clipping services that supply the clips, as do the end customers. VIP: Speaking of sharing, it came up frequently during the conference, but I noticed copyright didn't. EC: Sharing did, but copyrighting didn’t, you’re right. Copyright and legal sharing. I think one thing that has come up in these conferences before is that there’s a branding opportunity here. If you let some of that content out freely at the beginning and let people share it and then follow up with a more pay-per-use model, I think that's a really good branding opportunity and way to monetise the content in the long run.

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