Clare Painter Associates

Digital licensing agency, copyright audits, and publishing rights consultancy

Jumping in

/ By / In Copyright, Rights

It begins….   Some news from me. I’m delighted to say that I’m beginning a course in Copyright law of the UK, EU and US at Kings College London. Last week marked the official start, so I’ve just got going.

It’s exciting and not a little daunting to be returning to study many years after my degree. However, I’ve worked with rights and copyright for many years, and I’m really looking forward to putting that knowledge on a more formal footing.

For me, one of the main reasons for following the course is to see more clearly how copyright affects us day to day, in the things we can or can’t publish, and the things we can reuse and repurpose.

I’m particularly intrigued by how that’s going to play out from here onwards, with digital, market and political changes (yes, Brexit, but much more too) all conspiring to make digital use both easier and more complicated at the same time…

I’ll be sharing a few of my insights with you as I go through the course, particularly things that strike me as having a real-world impact on what we can and can’t do with copyright content – our own, or other people’s.

However, it will still be “business as normal” for me throughout the course, and this week I’m about to head off to Frankfurt Book Fair. No doubt I’ll see many of you there.

What do today’s controversial copyright changes mean for you?

/ By / In Copyright

As I’m writing this, today (12 September 2018) is the day that the European Parliament has voted to adopt some controversial and bitterly argued changes to copyright legislation. There has been heavy lobbying on both sides. There’s a distance to go yet, with further dialogue etc due before individual countries can start to implement the changes. And the implications for the UK with Brexit looming are even less certain.

Why does it matter to publishers, content owners and content users, with so much yet to play out? Because working with digital copyright in a practical context, which already involved a fair number of grey areas and difficult-to-assess risks, just became a bit more complex and unpredictable.

Isn’t it all irrelevant to the UK because of Brexit? Not if you’re publishing online or using content on, or from, the internet. That’s pretty much all of us in the corporate or commercial world, plus many others beyond. We already have to think about a variety of national copyright systems when we publish online (not only UK regulations), and we’ll still need to do the same beyond Brexit.

One of the things that has been adopted today is the so-called ‘link tax’, which is actually more about headlines, text and content rather than the sharing of simple links. It might (if rights holders want to enforce it) mean paying to display snippets of content, disrupting not only aggregated news services but also potentially e-learning and online publications. But charging for snippets will reduce traffic to your site… these are not easy choices for content owners to make.

Also controversial is the responsibility placed on websites and platforms to remove content which infringes copyright. How you assess what is or isn’t copyright infringement – very fast indeed, with flawless accuracy and at unimaginably vast scale – is, of course, the difficult bit.

In our copyright work, we’re used to looking for clues about whether the user who uploaded a particular image, video clip or article actually owns it or not. But even with our experience, it’s not always easy to tell.  The automated filters used by the big platforms have already thrown up some publicly-visible mistakes: blocking legitimate content and penalising users, or failing to spot infringing content. This is going to be messy. I’m told there’s also a proposal for a similar change in UK legislation, irrespective of what’s decided in the EU.

If you’re a publisher, all the more reason to put your rights management house in order. That includes image rights, which often get forgotten in older works. A lack of clear information can restrict you from exploring sales opportunities, and can even affect the value of your company.

If you use or own digital content, all the more reason to have clear guidelines for your staff about how copyright material should be acquired and used. It’s all about reducing the risks.

Who owns the copyright?

/ By / In Copyright, Image rights, Rights

Who owns the copyright? A handful of good places to begin

If you’re using images, text extracts or pretty much anything else, you’ll need to know who controls the rights. Even if the name of the author (or artist, or photographer, etc, etc) is pretty clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean you know who to turn to. Can you reuse the material? Who will be able to tell you? And what terms or costs might they impose?

I’ve gathered together a few ideas of places you can look online, to help with this first stage of your research.

It’s very, very far from exhaustive. A recent academic study found that cultural institutions wanting to check whether a work is a considered an “orphan” (i.e. without a known copyright holder) across a range of EU countries, will have to answer as many as 569 separate rights research questions. This can be a complex field if you try to be really thorough!

In the spirit of starting with something a little less draining than that, here are a few starting points for various types of content:

  • Writers, Artists and Their Copyright Holders (WATCH) – The WATCH File from the Universities of Texas and Reading is a useful first stop. It’s often the first place I’d try.
  • DACS – The Design and Artists Copyright Society represents visual artists if you are starting from the UK (though the artists themselves are worldwide). Search here to see if the artist you’re looking for is listed. (Remember you might need 2 separate licences if you’re using a photo of a work of art: one for the work itself if it’s still within copyright (could be from DACS), and another for the photo.
  • Poetry – Clearing permissions for poetry can be tricky. A handy feature of Faber’s online permissions tool is that, as well as allowing you to request permission for the poems they publish themselves, you’ll sometimes also find information about who else holds rights, if it isn’t with Faber. Worth searching here to see what comes up.
  • PLS Clear can help with extracts from books or serials, as long as the relevant publisher has signed up with their service.
  • Writers and Artists Yearbook – A UK-focussed list of literary agencies, book and audio publishers, magazines, newspapers, and more. I used to tell people that every UK public library would have a copy of the latest print edition (published annually), but in these straitened times I’m not certain if that’s still true. Either way, you might prefer to subscribe online
  • Firms Out of Business (FOB) – Publishing companies, literary agencies etc from the past. Often in rights research you’ll find out who used to represent a particular author, and that’s frustrating if you’re not sure where to go next. FOB is associated with WATCH, and helps when you want to know who bought a particular list or imprint.
  • International Literary Marketplace – International lists of publishers and literary agencies . The enormous printed volume of ILMP is expensive, and so is the full online service, but fortunately it’s possible to subscribe for as little as a week at a time. Plan your research in bulk, if you can!

 

 

4 Questions Before You Digitise

/ By / In Archive Material, Copyright, Image rights, Rights

If you have older titles or archive materials which you’d like to digitise, but rights issues are getting in the way, here are 4 quick questions you might like to examine…

There’s hardly a publisher anywhere, I’m pretty confident in saying, who doesn’t have a few titles lurking in a corner, undigitised, because there are rights issues. Copyright in the main text of the books might be sorted out, with author contracts happily in place, but something along the way prevents those titles from being turned into digital form and enjoying an extended life online.

This might seem surprising to those of you who don’t work in publishing houses. (This newsletter goes out to a wide range of people: readers are just as likely to come from professional societies and academic institutions, as from the world of publishing – and welcome to you all!)

Often, the reason certain titles cannot be digitised is connected to the images. Pictures might come from a range of different sources, and clearing them again for digital use would mean additional time and cost.

Other types of material can have different kinds of obstacles, but the fundamental issues for corporates, societies and book or journal publishers are largely the same.

There are 4 key questions to start with, if you want to digitise archival material of any kind, and you know there might be trouble ahead.

Do you know where the paperwork is?  – A basic question, perhaps, but it’s key to figuring out what the gaps are, and where to go next. If there’s nothing in the file (it happens), try looking for acknowledgements and captions in the printed work itself. What details can you see? You’ll still need to research who those copyright holders are and where to find them, but it gives you a starting point.

Can you figure out how many different copyright holders are involved?   – Start with a list of all the items, but really the thing that will make a difference to your rights research is the number of sources, not the number of items. That’s because each rights holder represents a search, a conversation and potentially a negotiation, whether it’s for one small item, or a list of many.

Do most of the rights holders still exist?  – More tricky than it sounds, this one, as content gets bought and sold on a fairly regular basis, folded into new companies and taken over again by someone else. But if your list includes a good proportion of recognisable, current names, your work will be much reduced.

What’s your approach to publishing risk?   – Lovely as it would be to carry on searching for historical rights holders until we’ve exhausted every single possibility, that’s just not feasible in today’s world where time and resources are limited. So you need to prioritise.

Which content is going to be most important to the digitised work? Which items represent a high risk if you can’t locate the rights holder, and how do you go about creating a research log for those items you really can’t identify?

The answer lies in balancing a combination of factors against each other: the high or low publishing risk can depend on the copyright status (how old is it and where is it from?), the type of source (do they still exist? who else might hold rights nowadays?), and the way you plan to use the material (in an ebook? for a client? in e-learning?).

Nothing can be safer than a proper permission licence, but if that’s really not possible, you can go a long way to reducing your risks by having a clear process in place, and an audit trail to show the steps you have taken.

EU Copyright Exceptions

/ By / In Copyright

This post was first published in Clare Painter’s digital rights newsletter on 26 September 2016

New Online Tool for EU Copyright Exceptions

Copyright exceptions are changing

There’s a great deal going on in the world of copyright reform, and I thought you might like to know about a handy new tool available online. It’s also free of charge.

There are currently multiple changes being implemented to the list of copyright exceptions in the countries of the European Union: exceptions are special provisions which allow you to use copyright material without needing formal permission from the rights holder, in specific circumstances.

It can be confusing when, inevitably, some countries legislate more swiftly than others, so to assist with this problem a new website has been set up. This shows you details of all the new exceptions, and the status of each one in every EU country: CopyrightExceptions.EU

Personally I find the map view particularly useful for an ‘at a glance’ view of particular exceptions across different countries. You will see there’s still some way to go in new legislation!

‘Fair’ Use

/ By / In Copyright, Rights

This post was first published in Clare Painter’s digital rights newsletter on 11 May 2016

When Can Use Be ‘Fair’?
Copyright rules vary across the world

Whenever you draw on someone else’s content, you need to know whether you’re likely to be breaching copyright or not. In the US, for example, ‘fair use’ was set up partly so as to allow certain reasonable uses without the (perhaps, perceived?) barrier of needing to seek permission.

But it doesn’t apply everywhere, and knowing when and how you can rely on it, can be quite nuanced.

New digital models sometimes push at the edges of what’s acceptable, and we saw this in action a week or so ago with the judgement of in favour of Google’s mass digitisation project.

However, ‘fair use’ as such only exists in a handful of countries. Most have their own legal variations, and these can vary widely. In the UK for example we have ‘fair dealing’: although it sounds similar, it is very different and a much weaker provision.

So, what does this mean in your own publishing?

It’s wise to handle copyright exceptions and exemptions very carefully, and understand that some small level of risk may still be present when you rely on ‘fair dealing’ or equivalent legislation – unless you actually get the opportunity to prove your case in court. That’s not a business model I’d recommend!