Licensing Digital Content

Moderated by Dan Duncan of McGraw-Hill; panelists are Caitlin Grusaukas, a law student; Mindy Pennington, librarian at Pfizer; Ed Colleran, CCC; Dominic Young, News Int'l.

Oops, I just unplugged the camera by mistake. That lapse in video? My fault. Sorry.

Question to panel: "What do users not like?" Caitlin: "Younger people have expectations that everything is going to be free. We're used to having everything at our fingertips - for a lot of people of my generation, the idea of copyright is something that we associate with MP3s and Napster, but people are not quite as cognizant of copyright restrictions on news and websites; access means that you can share it." Mindy: "People want to make it easy to share, and checking rights takes time. More and more people want to use content on their mobile device, and there's also issues around who they can share it with." People doing research together who don't have the same copyright clearance...it's difficult. Ed: "From the user standpoint, two big themes are ease of use, but they also want a broader set of rights; collaboration is a key to the business community." Dominic: "We're giving our users everything for free" - but he is also part of ACAP, which tries to allow those who own and control content to set the rules themselves.

Dan: "Many of the users don't even look at terms and conditions when they access content; the language is confusing, reads like a contract." Dominic: "It's important for users to know what they can and can't do, and making it difficult for them doesn't help anybody. Doing it in a way that's compatible with how the internet works is really important - the tools aren't there to do that." Dan to Mindy: "Are users educated as to terms and conditions?" Mindy: "Users never see the legal contracts. For purposes of reprints and taking things to conferences, we've implemented the CCC tool. We let users know what they're allowed and not allowed to do with it. Most people are fairly cognizant of what they're allowed to do."

Dan points out that content-generating/IP companies are generally more cognizant.

Caitlin: "In the broader university community, access is all seamless." But she points out that she can't always print, or access, everything - the copyright restrictions affect access.

Mindy: "License trumps copyright - there may be rights available to you that are not necessarily there under copyright." Dan: "Likewise licensing agreements can restrict."

Dan throws to Dominic...ACAP. "ACAP comes out of the free user industry, and the way the content is accessed and used by search engines works well for some publishers and not so well for others. The idea is that it can be done machine-to-machine, but to scale up the capability on the network."

Ed: "There's also an opportunity here with the advent of social media tools and online communities - some publishers have found a branding opportunity for their content."

Dan to Caitlin - would students pay for content? Caitlin: Students want information/media fast and quick, they'd be interested in paying a little bit for that. Mindy: Why aren't publishers releasing content in different formats, ones that would allow for ad placement? A lot of end users would like to flip through the journal even virtually, rather than article by article in a database.

Dan to Ed and Dominic - what now? Dominic stresses ACAP. He is difficult to hear; I don't think he's miked well. Ed: "It's not just about text content anymore - people want the video clip, the photograph - we see that as a big thing going down the line. It's not just the publishers, but authors as well - authors are taking a more predominant role, self-publishing, and that sort of thing.

Dan to Ed: "What ABOUT the authors?" Ed: "We see a whole other market, the Creative Commons type of authors, anybody who wants to get paid for certain uses and allowing it to be accessed for free for other uses."

Dan to Mindy: "Next 5 years?" Mindy: Micropayments, further chunkability. And chunkability in terms of audience, not just content - only 10 people want to use this chart. "A more granular approach to how we're going to do licensing."

Dan cites some MicroScripts: "Ease of use. Compliance." Also education. Publishers need to educate users about what they can and can't do.