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Rights Sevices

ACAP
ACAP provides a standard framework that allows publishers to express access and use policies in a language that internet search robots can understand. ACAP has the ambition for a much broader scope, communicating licences and permissions at machine-to-machine level in other business relationships and other media types including music and audiovisual materials. Importantly, a controlled vocabulary underpins ACAP.

ARROW
ARROW stands for ‘Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works’ and it is a project funded under the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme. Project partners include a broad range of European national libraries, publishers and collective management organisations. ARROW aims in particular to develop ways to clarify the rights status of orphan and out of print works, so they can be cleared for digitisation and inclusion in digital library initiatives. The project also seeks to enhance the interoperability of rights information between rights holders, agents, libraries and users. Solutions envisaged by the venture include the establishment of systems for the exchange of information about the rights status of works, the creation of a registry of orphan works and a network of rights clearance centres. Key to achieving this objective the project partners recognise is interoperability, standards deployment and stakeholder involvement.

Attributor
Attributor is a company that provides content tracking tools that can be used by publishers to detect piracy. It is promoted as a revenue generation tool because one strategy for stopping piracy is to licence the use of content by piracy sites.

Book Rights Registry
This may at first seem an odd service to list – after all the Book Rights Registry is about ‘the Google Settlement, dummy’. However, the Google Settlement is all about rights management. A rights registry will be founded as part of the settlement, if approved. The proposal is for the establishment of the registry to be funded by Google as part of the Settlement, but for it to be an independent, not-for-profit organisation that collects and disburses revenue from users of content (in the first case, only Google) to authors, publishers and other rights holders. The registry will therefore need to have access to rights information for all books (and parts of books) covered by the agreement and also their authors and publishers. Publishers wishing to claim works via the registry (for example to receive royalty payments or to opt-out or set licensing terms) will need to communicate about rights to the registry.

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, generally at no cost, in a way that is consistent with the rules of copyright. It provides licence templates to mark creative works with the permissions the creator wants it to carry, so others can reuse the work in appropriate ways. Creative Commons provides licences in forms that are readable by lawyers, other people, and machines.

iCopyright
iCopyright is a company that provides tools to embed in content which can automate rights and permissions for printing, emailing, posting, and republishing. It is promoted to publishers as a tool to maximise revenue and minimise piracy. It provides services to a number of well-known newspaper and magazine publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.

ONIX for Licensing Terms

The ONIX family consists family of standards has long underpinned the automated communication of physical books to all involved in the supply chain. The family has expanded recently with new messages to communicate about serials, and especially relevant here, messages for communicating about licences, repertoires, rights, and royalties. There are two particularly relevant ONIX messages. ONIX-PL is intended to support the licensing of electronic resources – such as online journals and ebooks – to academic and corporate libraries. It was developed in recognition that as the number of digital resources in library collections grows, libraries have increasing difficulty in managing, and ensuring compliance with, the correspondingly growing number of different licences that they hold. Reproduction Rights Organisations (RROs) are the agencies which manage the licensing of rights in printed and other media. EDItEUR (the organisation that develops and maintains the ONIX message family) is working with IFRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations) and its member agencies to develop, maintain and support a set of ONIX message formats for communicating licences and royalty payments.

OZMO
Ozmo is a service provided by Copyright Clearance Center and is and is described as a web-based service for licensing independent, or user-generated, content for commercial use. Ozmo is targeted at creators such as photographers, artists, bloggers and researchers who wish to licence their work to commercial customers (example given include marketing firms and advertising agencies). Ozmo is a great example of a self-help tool for the individual creator who wants to manage their rights without the assistance of a commercial intermediary such as a publisher. The scale of content made available via You Tube and Flickr and Facebook may often be intended for sharing freely, but when commercial users – expected or unexpected – emerge, then OZMO can help the creator earn revenue from the creation. Intriguingly, Ozmo is built on the Creative Commons CC+ protocol.

PLUS
The PLUS Coalition is an international non-profit organisation which aims to simplify and facilitate the communication and management of rights in photographs and other graphic images. The aim is to ensure that all parties will be able to instantly determine the licence associated with any digital file. No longer will photographers (or their clients) need to search through old job folders and databases just to find the licence information associated with an image. The benefits of PLUS are described as providing standardised billing codes related to image rights, new revenue through streamlined re-licensing, work tracking that discourages the removal or alteration of the licence information embedded in a file, improved customer confidence delivered through more transparent and ethical industry-wide practices, and improved customer satisfaction.

Rightslink
Rightslink is another service offered by the Copyright Clearance Center. It provides publishers with a service for automating reprint and permission services at the point that readers interact with, or discover, the content. It is marketed to publishers as generating new revenue, improving customer satisfaction, and as a market intelligence tool. Rightlink is more than an e-commerce tool as it automates an entire licensing process from order processing, through workflow management, to reporting and royalty payments.

Rightsphere
Rightsphere is a tool for corporations with electronic collections and facilitates knowledge sharing and copyright compliance by providing employees clear, direct answers to their content usage questions. It relies on information professionals such as corporate librarians to enter information about all the rights acquired under licence from publishers. The information professionals can input these data in ways appropriate to the organisation, for example assigning, maintaining and organising rights by country or site.

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