Lots of action in the online copyright realm. The New York Times now has one-click quick-buy licensing of items from the current newspaper, by way of Copyright.com
http://www.copyright.com/ccc/do/viewPage?pageCode=au118
Here is an excerpt from the press release on the corporate solution:
Copyright Clearance Center Announces Rightsphere™: First Comprehensive Rights Advisory & Management Solution for Content Users and Librarians
Web-based Service Bridges Gap between Knowledge Sharing and Copyright Compliance
DANVERS, MA, June 8, 2006 — Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the world’s largest provider of text licensing solutions, today announced the launch of Rightsphere™, a revolutionary Web-based rights advisory and management service that helps corporations promote collaboration and the free flow of published information while respecting copyright.
The first-of-its-kind service, which will debut June 11 at the Annual Conference of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) in Baltimore, is a major advance for companies that place high value on knowledge sharing and innovation. Rightsphere provides a customized, comprehensive view of all rights assets held by a business and delivers unambiguous answers to the common employee question: “What can I do with this content?”
“Rightsphere goes right to the heart of the fear, confusion and complexity that stifle companies from unleashing the value of the content they obtain,” says Chuck Richard, Vice President & Lead Analyst, Outsell, Inc. “It is a rights performance solution with a major productivity upside that knocks aside the logs in the corporate rights-clearing logjam. It captures CCC’s deep understanding of the value of content and the value of rights within an elegant solution for enterprises: deliver more game-changing content to employees with less rights angst and busywork.”
Rightsphere makes information about a company’s content reuse rights instantly available to employees at their desktops, dramatically reducing the time it takes to verify copyright permissions. By consolidating all of these rights assets in a single, easy-to-access repository, Rightsphere enables librarians and information professionals to organize and manage rights by country, city or department. These rights can come from many sources, including CCC’s annual licenses and per-use permissions, licenses obtained directly from publishers, aggregators and other information providers and licenses purchased from rights organizations in other countries. Utilizing Rightsphere’s powerful administrative application, content and license managers can easily add, modify and delete records about publications, rights conditions and other content information.
Global pharmaceutical companies Novartis and AstraZeneca both are working with CCC as charter customers for Rightsphere. Deborah Juterbock, global head of the Novartis Knowledge Center, calls Rightsphere “a key element in our copyright and corporate compliance policies.”
Market Need
CCC designed Rightsphere for organizations that view collaboration as a key driver of innovation and growth. With so much information available at the speed of a keystroke, it has never been easier to copy, forward or e-mail content to anyone, at any time. But regularly distributing content without copyright permission violates most corporations’ IP compliance policies and conflicts with copyright law. Many companies instruct employees to ask corporate library staff for permission before they share published documents. This is a time-consuming process that disrupts employee workflow, consumes hours of librarian time and ultimately slows collaboration and innovation.
To avoid this delay, some employees distribute articles without waiting for permission, violating ethics policies and exposing organizations to claims of copyright infringement. In response, some companies institute restrictive policies on information sharing, hampering the company’s higher mission: to learn and grow. “That’s why it’s never been more important for companies to know what rights they have, and to give their employees access to them—quickly and easily,” says CCC Vice President of Marketing Bill Burger.
“Rightsphere is designed for today’s knowledge economy, in which information collaboration is critical,” says Burger. “Published documents are shared among coworkers, customers and business partners at ever-increasing rates, but old methods of rights approval and rights management have failed to keep pace. Rightsphere addresses a company’s need to boost
knowledge and innovation through better use of its information assets, while also complying with its own ethical and legal policies.”