Copyright Talk

Copyright.com is a clearinghouse for persons who want to use copyrighted material to connect with the copyright holders. According to their website,
“Copyright Clearance Center manages the rights to over 1.75 million works and represents more than 9,600 publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors and other creators. The company’s streamlined, convenient compliance solutions enable more than 10,000 corporations and subsidiaries, including most of the Fortune 100, and thousands of government agencies, law firms, document suppliers, libraries, academic institutions, copy shops and bookstores to respect the rights of copyright holders and lawfully reuse the copyright-protected information they need to drive their business.”

It’s a relatively simple process for publishers and authors. The publishers and authors register their works with the clearance center, and set their own royalty rates for various uses. The Center then collects and distributes the royalties from people who buy the permissions. The Center keeps a percentage to cover their operating costs.

For a user, however, the service is not as friendly. A company or person looking for permission to use a copyrighted work would search the Center’s database by publication title, publisher name, or ISBN number. If the work is in the database, the user can tell immediately if permission is available for the the use they want, and exactly how much it will cost. They can then pay right then, on a per use basis or they can purchase an annual license to cover multiple uses of multiple works.

The system works for users only if they know what work they want and if it is in the database. If the publisher or author has not registered the work to be licensed by the Copyright Clearance Center, then the user must find and contact the copyright holder directly. Although the Center has huge numbers of works in its database, it’s still just a drop in the bucket of the total number of copyrighted works in existence. Going through the Center merely adds a step to the process of seeking permissions that stands a good chance of falling flat.

If the Center wants to be the real “go-to” place for copyright permission sales, they need to have a search feature that catagorizes the material they manage.