Employees consume and share copyrighted materials all day long. It’s just business. However, routine content exchanges such as sharing published reports, articles and other information found on the Web, have copyright implications, which can expose companies to a greater risk of infringement. While you may know the basics of copyright, your colleagues and staff may not.

What is copyright?

In the U.S., copyright is a form of protection provided by the government to the authors of “original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works.” This protection is available to both published and unpublished works in the U.S., regardless of the nationality or domicile of the author. Copyright protection exists from the time the work is created in a fixed, tangible form of expression. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Here is a breakdown of where U.S. copyright law protection starts and ends:

Protected by Copyright:

• Literary works (not just The Grapes of Wrath or The Tipping Point, but all works expressed in writing both in print and digital form, however formally or informally recorded)
• Computer software (considered to be literary works)
• Pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works (e.g., paintings, drawings, carvings, photographs, clothing designs, textiles)
• Architectural works (e.g., buildings themselves as well as blueprints, drawings, diagrams, and models)
• Sound recordings (e.g., songs, music, spoken word, sounds, and other recordings)
• Audiovisual works (e.g., live action movies, animation, television programs, and videogames)
• Pantomimes and choreographic works (e.g., the art of imitating or acting out situations, and the composition of dance movements and patterns, including those accompanied by music)
• Dramatic works and accompanying music (e.g., plays and musicals)

Not Protected by Copyright:

• Works that have not been fixed in a tangible medium of expression (that is, not written, recorded, or captured electronically)
• Titles, names, short phrases and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents
• Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration
• Works consisting entirely of information that are natural or self-evident facts, containing no original authorship, such as the white pages of telephone books, standard calendars, height and weight charts, and tape measures and rulers
• Works created by the U.S. Government
• Works for which copyright has expired; works in the public domain

Understanding the extent to which materials are copyright protected can help you minimize the risk of infringement by well-intentioned employees. Make it easy for employees to get up-to-speed by checking out our Copyright Education programs.

This blog post is also available as a PDF. Access it here.

*Much of the information in this post was drawn from content posted on the website of the U.S. Copyright Office and is based on the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. The information appears here in an edited form. For the complete, unedited text, visit: www.copyright.gov.

The post What Is (and Isn’t) Protected by Copyright? appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Monday, October 30 was the final date for interested parties to submit comments to a comprehensive “Notice of inquiry and request for comments” issued by the United States Copyright Office entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Copyright.” With 34 questions asked about both copyright and technology, some parties responses exceed 100 pages. More than 9,000 responses have been filed. On the assumption that readers might be interested in this topic and less interested in reviewing all the responses, I have pasted below a selection of questions and answers from Copyright Clearance Center’s (CCC’s) own response.

Does the increasing use or distribution of AI-generated material raise any unique issues for your sector or industry as compared to other copyright stakeholders?

AI generated materials may both advance text publishing and hinder it. In sectors such as science, news, and book publishing, poor quality AI materials can generate bad science, promote misinformation, and lead to harmful results. This is not to say that such is the inevitable result of all AI; merely that it is a meaningful risk with respect to certain AI applications. AI can advance text publishing by providing tools for writing, checking, validating, and improving text-based works. It is also useful for primary research that may result in the creation of new content.

How or where do developers of AI models acquire the materials or datasets that their models are trained on? To what extent is training material first collected by third-party entities (such as academic researchers or private companies)?

In the text sector, developers of AI models — when acting lawfully — acquire materials and data sets from publishers, other rightsholders, websites that allow crawling, intermediaries, and aggregators (such as CCC). Significant amounts of content are available through licenses, including open licenses such as CC BY and CC BY-NC. Significant amounts of content are also available through the public domain. When acting unlawfully, AI developers receive materials from pirate sites, through downloading in violation of express terms and flags, and from so-called “shadow libraries,” among other things.

To what extent are copyrighted works licensed from copyright owners for use as training materials? To your knowledge, what licensing models are currently being offered and used?

Copyrighted materials are licensed for AI use directly by rightsholders and collectively through rights aggregators such as CCC. CCC’s collective licenses are non-exclusive, global, and fully voluntary. Our current AI-related offerings are focused on the corporate, research, academic and education markets.

Additionally, in science publishing, under “open access” business models, copyright owners employ open licensing which sometimes allows licensed reuse for AI under the terms of such licenses. According to this report, open models accounted for 31% of articles, reviews and conference papers in 2021.

Are some or all training materials retained by developers of AI models after training is complete, and for what purpose(s)? Please describe any relevant storage and retention practices.

Humans communicate in natural language by placing words in sequences; the rules about what the sequencing and specific form of a word are dictated by the specific language (e.g., English). An essential part of the architecture for all software systems (and therefore AI systems) that process text is how to represent that text so that the functions of the system can be performed most efficiently.

Almost all large language models are based on the “transformer architecture,” which invokes the “attention mechanism.” The latter is a mechanism that allows the AI technology to view entire sentences, and even paragraphs, at once rather than as a mere sequence of characters. This allows the software to capture the various contexts within which a word can occur.

Therefore, a key step in the processing of a textual input in language models is the splitting of the user input into special “words” that the AI system can understand. Those special words are called “tokens.” The component that is responsible for that is called a “tokenizer.” There are many types of tokenizers. For example, OpenAI and Azure OpenAI use a subword tokenization method called “Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)” for its Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)-based models. BPE is a method that merges the most frequently occurring pairs of characters or bytes into a single token, until a certain number of tokens or a vocabulary size is reached. The larger the vocabulary size, the more diverse and expressive the texts that the model can generate.

Once the AI system has mapped the input text into tokens, it encodes the tokens into numbers and converts the sequences (even up to multiple paragraphs) that it processed as vectors of numbers that we call “word embeddings.” These are vector-space representations of the tokens that preserve their original natural language representation that was given as text. It is important to understand the role of word embeddings when it comes to copyright because the embeddings are the representations (or encodings) of entire sentences, paragraphs, and even documents, in a high-dimensional vector space. It is through the embeddings that the AI system captures and stores the meaning and the relationships of the words from the natural language.

Embeddings are used in practically every task that a generative AI system performs (e.g., text generation, text summarization, text classification, text translation, image generation, code generation, and so on).

Word embeddings are usually stored in vector databases but a detailed description of all the approaches to storage is beyond the scope of this response since there is a wide variety of vendors, processes, and practices that are in use.

Under what circumstances would the unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train AI models constitute fair use? Please discuss any case law you believe relevant to this question.

U.S. law has no specific rules governing the use of copyrighted materials to train AI. Rather, such uses fall under the general copyright regime. Under U.S. law, copying copyrighted content to train AI can state a cause of action for infringement [Citing, Thomson Reuters Enters. Ctr. GmbH v. ROSS Intelligence Inc., 529 F.Supp.3d 303 (D. Del. 2021) (downloading and copying of Westlaw database for the purpose of training AI).] Thus, such activities require a license to be non-infringing unless they fall under the fair use exception.

The application of fair use to an infringement is fact dependent. Copying for purposes of training an AI will usually entail copying the complete work. Whether the copying is for commercial or non-commercial research purposes will be considered. The courts will also look very closely at market harm under the fourth factor. As stated by the Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 590 (1994) “[the fourth factor] requires courts to consider not only the extent of market harm caused by the particular actions of the alleged infringer, but also ‘whether unrestricted and widespread conduct of the sort engaged in by the defendant … would result in a substantially adverse impact on the potential market’ for the original.” And, as reinforced by the recent Supreme Court decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. (2023), the impact of the infringing use on licensing is one of the key factors in determining market harm.

Relevant instructional cases include the cases mentioned above as well as Fox News Network, LLC v. TVEyes, Inc., 883 F.3d 169 (2d Cir. 2018), where the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a fair use defense in a case of allegedly transformative compiling of recorded broadcasts into text searchable databases that allowed search and viewing of short excerpts. By contrast, the Second Circuit had previously considered the text mining of scanned books for non-commercial social science research in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. 721 F.3d 132 (2d Cir. 2015), and held that copies made and used for a specific purpose involving snippets would likely fall under fair use.

There are currently multiple pending cases in the U.S. relating to use of copyrighted content for the development of AI systems. Congress has expressed interest in the issue by including language in the SAFE Innovation Framework that the Framework will “support our creators by addressing copyright concerns, protect intellectual property, and address liability.”

Should copyright owners have to affirmatively consent (opt in) to the use of their works for training materials, or should they be provided with the means to object (opt out)?

Copyright is, and should remain, an opt in regime. Placing the burden of asserting rights on the copyright holders is inequitable, burdensome, and largely impractical. Only those making copies know what they are copying in the first instance and thus the copyright owners are not in a position to opt out.

9.2. If an ‘‘opt out’’ approach was adopted, how would that process work for a copyright owner who objected to the use of their works for training? Are there technical tools that might facilitate this process, such as a technical flag or metadata indicating that an automated service should not collect and store a work for AI training uses?

There is good reason that copyright is an “opt in” regime. Some AI developers have gathered content by routinely ignoring flags, copyright notices and metadata. Thus, while there are protocols and flags that can be used and are used by rightsholders and honored by ethical AI developers, they are no substitute for placing the responsibility for compliance on the user. Moreover, requiring flags and metadata assumes that the content resides on a server or website under the control of the rightsholder. This is not always true. For example, in the recent case of Am. Soc’y for Testing & Materials v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 82 F.4th 1262 (D.C. Cir. 2023), the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the non-commercial posting of technical standards incorporated into reference by law is fair use. It would be problematic to assume that the entity posting the standards over the objection of copyright owners would take steps to reserve the copyright owner’s AI rights.

Finally, for smaller creators, any obligation to adopt technical protection measures or flags is unfair and unduly burdensome.

Technical flags and metadata are useful for AI developers who act ethically and have another great value; where ignored by AI developers they can provide evidence of willfulness.

What legal, technical, or practical obstacles are there to establishing or using such a process? Given the volume of works used in training, is it feasible to get consent in advance from copyright owners?

It is feasible to acquire advance consent of copyright owners. It is not feasible to place the burden on rightsholders to police their rights without knowing who is using their works without authorization and how the works are being used.

The burden of implementing technical measures, flags, and metadata may, depending on the sector, be involved, complicated and costly to copyright owners. In the recent past, international sector-wide initiatives such as ACAP have absorbed significant time and resources on the part of rightsholders and users seeking to act ethically, only to be rejected by the tech industry. Current efforts of note include the W3C Text and Data Mining Rights Reservation Protocol.

As noted above, as a practical matter, a copyright holder may have no control over websites where its content is held. This is especially true where content is posted in violation of copyright or under a copyright exception.

There is certainly enough copyrightable material available under license to build reliable, workable, and trustworthy AI. Just because a developer wants to use “everything” does not mean it needs to do so, is entitled to do so, or has the right to do so. Nor should governments and courts twist or modify the law to accommodate them.

The post The United States Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry on AI: A Quick Take appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The 1976 Act was the first major revision of US copyright law since the 1909 Act, which was passed during the era of Mark Twain, ragtime, player pianos, and early silent films. The 1976 Act brought in many aspects of copyright with which we are now familiar, including codifying fair use in Section 107 (it previously had been applied on a common law basis). The Act also did away with some formalities; no longer do you have to renew your copyright to enjoy the full term of protection and no longer are copyright notices required for protection. And one quirk: while we refer to the law as the 1976 Act, its effective date is actually January 1, 1978 (the same date that CCC opened its doors, not coincidentally).

Interestingly, President Ford’s signature on the 1976 Act was not his last public brush with copyright law. Instead, in 1985, Ford’s memoir was at the center of the landmark Supreme Court case Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises. In his memoir, Ford recounted growing up in Michigan, serving in Congress, and the complicated events of the 1970’s that brought him to the Presidency. Harper & Row had a first publication rights agreement with Ford, but The Nation used a pre-publication copy of the memoir to scoop everyone else with an excerpt from the book. Of course, The Nation published the juiciest details from the memoir: Ford’s reasons for pardoning his predecessor, Richard Nixon. Harper & Row brought suit and The Nation argued that publishing the excerpts was a fair use. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which applied the four fair use factors spelled out in the recent implemented 1976 Act, reversed the Court of Appeals, and found that the use was not fair. Justice O’Connor, who delivered the Court’s opinion, wrote:

The Court of Appeals erred in concluding that The Nation‘s use of the copyrighted material was excused by the public’s interest in the subject matter. It erred, as well, in overlooking the unpublished nature of the work and the resulting impact on the potential market for first serial rights of permitting unauthorized prepublication excerpts under the rubric of fair use. Finally, in finding the taking ‘infinitesimal,’ the Court of Appeals accorded too little weight to the qualitative importance of the quoted passages of original expression. In sum, the traditional doctrine of fair use, as embodied in the Copyright Act, does not sanction the use made by The Nation of these copyrighted materials. Any copyright infringer may claim to benefit the public by increasing public access to the copyrighted work. But Congress has not designed, and we see no warrant for judicially imposing, a ‘compulsory license’ permitting unfettered access to the unpublished copyrighted expression of public figures.

The decision also includes one of my favorite Supreme Court quotes on copyright, Justice O’Connor’s eloquent description of copyright: “[I]t should not be forgotten that the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.”

In the many years that have since passed, the 1976 Act has been updated many times. Along with these revisions, the Act continues to provide the United States with a flexible and balanced copyright law that promotes copyright’s constitutional mission to promote progress and work as the engine of free expression.

The post October 19, 1976 – President Gerald Ford Signs the “New” Copyright Act…and Much More appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Thousands of years ago, Enheduanna of Mesopotamia was writing works of art describing many aspects of the human condition. Considered to be the first named author in history, she was creating hymns and poems long before more well known authors like Homer and Shakespeare were honing their crafts. Innumerable women have followed in her footsteps, creating original works that inspire and innovate, shaping the world we live in today. It would be impossible to recount the full depth and breadth of women’s creativity and innovation, much less in this short space. From Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus, which accompanies the Statue of Liberty and seeks “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” to Georgia O’Keefe’s breathtaking paintings, our world is full of the rich history of women’s creativity.

The theme of this year’s World Intellectual Property Day, “Women and IP: Accelerating Innovation and Creativity,” provides an opportunity for all of us to reflect on the importance of these women creators and the challenges that still exist. The World Intellectual Property Organization, which founded World Intellectual Property Day, is highlighting a number of examples of women’s creativity and innovation, and they are joined by other organizations celebrating women in these fields.

Nevertheless, recognition and appreciation for women’s original works has not always matched the creativity that exists.  Studies based on U.S. Copyright Office data provide a glimpse into the historical rates of registration, which is itself a window into how often women creators seek intellectual property law protections. One study found that overall registration rates for women authors increased from 30% to 36% between 1978 and 2012, with significant differences depending on the type of work. For example, registration records suggest that, during that time period, there was an increase in the percentage of women author filings for text, movies, and software, but that the other types of works remained relatively the same. A later study found that the numbers of women authors in registration records continued to increase, showing that women represented 38.5% of authors of registered works in 2020.

Registration records, however, can only provide one piece of the puzzle because registration is not mandatory for copyright protection (though it is necessary to go to court over infringement of a US work or to seek certain types of compensation in litigation). Other indicators show that women creators have made incredible strides in the literary market, with one news story deeming the jump of women authors from 10 to 50% the “book market’s female revolution.”  Improvements are markedly more modest in other areas, with the percentage of women working behind the scenes on movies rising 7% between 1998 and 2022, and the percentage of women game developers rising from 22% in 2014 to 30% in 2021.

On this World Intellectual Property Day, it is important to embrace and encourage women creators and innovators. I hope that you will join me in celebrating women in looking for ways to overcome the challenges that remain.

The post CCC Celebrates World Intellectual Property Day 2023 appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

• Rebecca Cook, Associate Director, Copyright and Permissions Licensing, Wiley 
• Leslie Lansman, Global Permissions Manager, Springer Nature 
• Jackie Marchington, Head of Compliance and Ethics, IPG Health Medical Communications 
• Elizabeth Jennings, Associate Editorial Director, Lucid Group 

The panelists drew on their respective decades of experience to answer questions submitted by the audience, and the discussion covered a range of topics regarding reuse in medical communications projects, including when copyright permission is needed and common use cases around permissions. 

Below are some common myths about copyright in medical communications that were addressed during the webcast, as well as responses by the expert panelists: 

Myth 1 — You can always redraw or reimage tables and figures without a license. 

Rebecca Cook, Wiley: 

“I think what we need to clarify here is what we mean by redrawing. And, if by that you mean you’re going to copy it in some way, you’re going to reproduce something that looks very similar to the original version with maybe a few amendments, or you’re getting it nicely reconfigured digitally, what you’re not really doing, then, is redrawing a figure. In the copyright sense, you’re reproducing that figure, and that means that permission is required.” 

Elizabeth Jennings, Lucid Group: 

How medical communications professionals and rightsholders interpret tracing of a figure can vary quite a bit. One publisher may consider tracing adaptation, but another could have a different stance. It’s important to share with each publisher how you intend to reuse the figure. “Let’s not put ourselves or our clients at risk,” Jennings advised. 

Leslie Lansman, Springer Nature:

Remember that not all adaptations are the same. Lansman shared that on occasion agents contact her with adaptations that only incorporate unprotected elements of the original figure. In such situations, permission is not required, but it can be difficult to judge. She advises that it’s always best to reach out the rightsholder with your questions: “We are on the side of transparency.”   

Myth 2 — If you buy a license for content, you never need to buy another one. 

Jackie Marchington, IPG Health Medical Communications: 

When you secure a permission, you provide specific details about how you intend to reuse the content, the number of people who will view the content, etc. Those factors are considered when the rightsholders determine whether to grant the license and at what cost. If you then want to reuse the content in another way, the details of the reuse scenario change and therefore could impact the publisher’s licensing and pricing decisions.   

Rebecca Cook, Wiley:  

When it comes to licenses and permissions, the reuse rights you’ve secured are a matter of contract law. “If you have a license that stipulates that it’s tied to a specific use case, that’s what that license is going to cover,” Cook explained. “As rightsholders, we want to be flexible while making sure that the type of use is covered effectively in the license.” 

Elizabeth Jennings, Lucid Group: 

“As you’re going through the project, what you’re initially planning may change,” Jennings said. Be as clear as possible upfront but go back to the publisher for guidance if you need to amend the reuse details, she advised. 

Myth 3 — If a Creative Commons license is available, you don’t need further permissions. 

Elizabeth Jennings, Lucid Group: 

According to Jennings, people often make the mistake of considering Creative Commons as a green light to reuse content without seeking permission from the rightsholder. However, there are many types of Creative Commons license, which determines how content can be reused. “You have to look really carefully to determine whether the specific Creative Commons license allows reuse on a commercial basis, which is where MedComms most often fits in,” she explained. 

Rebecca Cook, Wiley: 

The question commercial versus non-commercial often comes up in the context of Creative Commons licenses. “Whether an activity is generating revenue or not is not the determining factor as to whether most rightsholders would consider an activity as being commercial,” Cook said.  

Cook cautioned against assuming internal training and educational presentations are non-commercial. “In reality, most rightsholders would consider anything that involves either the direct financial gain for an organization, or even indirect financial gain for an organization, as falling outside the scope of a non-commercial Creative Commons license,” she said. “When in doubt, double-check, because each rightsholder will have a different interpretation.” 

For more information, check out the full recording of the panel discussion now to watch an in-depth discussion of the above myths and get answers to many common questions about reuse in medical communications.

The post Addressing Common Reuse Questions in Medical Communications appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

But you won’t have to wait for the listening sessions to learn about at least one part of the initiative. Concomitantly with announcing the overall initiative, the Office released new registration guidance on how to handle registration of works that include material generated by AI-technology. The guidance notes that U.S. copyright law only protects works that are the result of human authorship, tracing some of the history. This includes a reference to the famed monkey selfie case and the not as well-known Urantia case, which involved a rather unique set of allegations relating to purported non-human spiritual being authors. The Office also explains that there are situations when a work can include both human and non-human authorship and, if the human authorship is sufficiently creative, that part of a work is copyrightable. And there also are situations in which a human author could use AI-generated works in a combination that could warrant copyright protection.

The Office’s view on mixed human/non-human authorship vis-à-vis AI-generated works makes sense and aligns with the copyrightability analysis for other types of works. For example, you could not obtain copyright protection for a dinosaur skeleton (something clearly not human-authored) by itself, but you most likely could get protection for a sculpture made entirely of bones. Even in other areas not involving human authorship questions, you could get protection for a work that combines uncopyrightable elements like geometric shapes, while you could not obtain protection for a single uncopyrightable element like a simple, unadorned rectangle.

The guidance provides information on how to apply to register works that include AI-generated material (for example, it instructs applicants to use the Standard instead of Single Application). It also explains how to file an application for Supplementary Registration, which can update existing registrations to correct an omission like failure to disclaim AI-generated portions of a work. In short, for anyone handling copyright registration applications that involve an AI aspect, it’s a must read.

We’ll all have to stay tuned to see how the initiative develops and to see what other guidance the Office might release.

The post U.S. Copyright Office Launches AI Initiative, Including New Registration Guidance appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

As with the simple version of most complex matters, this was — while not wrong — not the full story, either.

For a long time – most of the 20^th century at least – calculating copyright terms has been a complicated matter. Congress extended the terms a few times, modified requirements for registration and “harmonized” US copyright law according to treaty agreements. Building on others’ initial work, Prof. Peter Hirtle of Cornell developed a clear and readable, chart with the results of this progression, and that chart has been maintained and updated since its first publication in 1999.

Let’s go back to ‘simple but accurate’—An FAQ on the US Copyright Office website, How Long Does Copyright Protection Last? sums up the current rules with precision:

“As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first.”

This is a statement about the rules for the United States. Except as adjusted (“harmonized”) by treaty, copyright law is managed nationally, by the laws of the local country. Some countries have shorter terms; a few have longer ones.

Taking each of these clauses in turn —

Life of the Author Plus 70: In the case of a work by a single, known author (i.e., a creator, a natural person), published from 1978 on, the copyright will last while that author is alive plus an additional 70 years. Examples include Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ (novel, 1978), ‘More Songs about Buildings and Food’ by the band Talking Heads (album of original music, 1978); and the acrylic and silkscreen image ‘Self-Portrait’ by Andy Warhol (1978). Stephen King is still quite alive, but Andy Warhol died in 1987. Applying the “life plus 70” rule to this example, the math says … 1987 + 70 is 2057, or 34 years from now. This may be the easiest case, because a work is a work and a creator is a creator. And a rose is a rose and a horse is a horse, of course. These provisions also cover works left unpublished at the death of their author.

Coincidentally, the poem containing the phrase “A rose is a rose is a rose” was first published in 1922 and the term of its copyright has thus expired, as has its creator, Gertrude Stein.

Anonymous/Pseudonymous Works: A work protectible by copyright under the current law (created after January 1, 1978) with no identifiable author gets at least 95 years, and no more than 120 years, of protection. In our time, informed by huge databases and nearly ubiquitous social media, the persistence of  anonymous/pseudonymous authorship seems much more unlikely than perhaps it did in the long-ago; alternatively, if the actual author behind the pseudonymous work decides to register the work with the Copyright Office in their real-life name or is simply otherwise identified in some publicly-accessible way, the work will be treated under the “life plus 70” rules.

However, many works indeed are published without an author attribution. In a “digital first” age without a role in many cases for an intermediary who knows the “secret,” these will only continue to grow in proportion to the whole. One question this implies is, if they remain truly anonymous, who will be able to ‘exploit’ such works economically, such as by collecting them and putting them in a sellable book? Recent examples of works published anonymously include: the author of the 1996 novel “Primary Colors” (later identified as journalist Joe Klein); in the visual arts, the notorious and transgressive Banksy is still anonymous; ‘John le Carré’s oeuvre was written by a former British civil servant of quite a different name; and there are many other well-known and well-published examples.

Work Made For Hire: Both before and since the advent of our digital era, the number of works made and published at the request of corporate entities, the most common, but by no means the only, example of “works made for hire” has proliferated dramatically since the days that all ink-stained wretches and other artists worked alone in their garrets. While such works –have always been part of the mix, nearly every major corporation does a substantial amount of web-based publishing now, as do many, many small-to-medium businesses. Works produced by employees, in the normal course of their employment, are presumptively works-made-for-hire. (For more details on this complicated topic, see Circular 30.)

Unlike natural persons, corporations potentially live forever, as Mark Twain pointed out as long ago as 1906. Some companies founded before 1900 are still in operation. The 120-year (outer) limit applies to the works they control.

Although this mix these rules for various sorts of works under copyright and the challenge of logically applying said rules to any given work may sound confusing, this language from the USCO Circular 15a,  ‘Duration of Copyright’ does clear it up:

For works made for hire and anonymous and pseudonymous works, the duration of copyright is 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

Though life extension efforts continue, ‘nearly a century’ seems plenty to me, for the social and personal purposes of copyright. Although some may desire it, any form of “perpetual copyright” still seems like a bad idea.

A final, speculative note: US law does not currently recognize the outputs of AI as per se protectible by copyright, unless an underlying human or corporate person is willing, and qualified under the legal rules, to take the credit as author. However, this may change in time. And, while authors die, AIs – while they can be turned off – do not. I could see treating the outputs of generative AI programs under some modification of the existing rules for anonymous creators. We’ll see.

The post Some Additional Wrinkles to US Copyright Terms appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Trends reported in the latest Information Seeking and Consumption Study, published by analyst firm Outsell, Inc., shows that companies are discussing their copyright policies more frequently, leading to 74% of employees reporting awareness of those policies. However, employee behaviors are often misaligned with policy expectations.

Importance of Content

Published content is at the heart of innovation. The ease with which teams can access and share information, such as news, feature articles, research reports, and more, can influence the pace at which organizations and their teams drive innovation and deliver products and services to the market. According to analysts Outsell’s recent study about information seeking and consumption, on average, employees share content nearly 8 times per week with 15 people. When you consider that 49% of the content that’s shared is externally sourced, that’s about 57 potential instances of unlicensed sharing per employee, per week.

Do Your Employees Understand Your Company’s Copyright Policies? (Most Don’t)

Access to third-party published content is crucial for employees at research-driven organizations. While the sharing of information with co-workers supports collaboration and drives innovation, the sharing of this content without first obtaining the necessary subscriptions, licenses, or permissions also carries enormous potential risk. Simple content exchanges to help further a discussion and keep business moving may actually create or increase the risk of copyright infringement, leading to costly lawsuits or settlements and affecting brand reputation.

Protecting your company’s intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, and creative materials produced by employees or contractors and protected by copyright, is important. Your employees would likely agree with this statement, but the most recent study from analyst firm Outsell, Inc. results contain some worrying statistics about employee sentiments about copyright:

Without that awareness of the limitations on what they can lawfully do, employees may share content without full awareness of the limitations of what they can lawfully do, unaware they’re putting their organization at risk.

3 Quick Tips to Increase Copyright Awareness

1. New employees need to be made aware of the company’s copyright policy and should receive ongoing reinforcement thereafter, so information isn’t forgotten or outdated.
2. Employee training should include relatable experiences and specific use cases, so your team can better understand the granular aspects of their company policy. Provide scenarios, such as: If your company has just been featured in an influential trade journal, can the article be sent to a small group of coworkers via a collaboration tool? Or, if you have permission to use an entire article, can you extract one chart and put it in a presentation?
3. Make it easy for employees to get answers. When employees don’t receive thorough training, they may not be sure who to turn to with copyright questions. Designate a copyright expert or department that can answer these questions, and make this service known to your entire organization.

Businesses can take steps to support employee education [link to copyright education] and communication about copyright and deploy appropriate compliance solutions to support a streamlined content workflow. Those solutions should make it easier for all employees to secure needed permissions through proper licensing and copyright-compliant content management software.

Download the Information Seeking and Consumption Study Report

Get more details about employee content sharing habits and insights into how people think and behave in the context of copyrighted content consumption, use, and sharing by accessing the complete 2023 Information Seeking and Consumption Report.

The post Increasing Your Employees’ Copyright Awareness appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

CCC today announced key findings from the just released “Information Seeking and Consumption Study” based on data gathered by Outsell, Inc., the voice of the data, information and analytics industry.

According to results from the most recent study, potential instances of unlicensed sharing per employee in the executive suite was significantly higher than middle management or individual users, even as executives had the highest reported level of copyright awareness.

According to the study, email is still the preferred method of distributing information but is trending downwards. Collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Workspace continue to gain traction, doubling the percentage of respondents who say these are their preferred methods of sharing information from 16% in 2020 to 33% today.

“This study provides information managers with a number of key insights into how knowledge workers access and share information,” said Ned May, COO, Outsell. “As new collaboration tools begin to displace email as the primary way of exchanging ideas among employees, there’s a new set of challenges around ensuring proper sharing rights and that may expose companies to greater risk.”

“With collaboration tools and practices continuously evolving, companies must take care to protect their organization from the risk of copyright infringement,” said Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, CCC.  “This study reaffirms the importance of having a well-communicated copyright policy and education program, supported by comprehensive licensing solutions.”

CCC provides a wide range of resources to help organizations support the needs of information users at all levels of the enterprise. The Annual Copyright License (ACL) is a trusted solution that complements publisher agreements and subscriptions by providing a consistent set of reuse rights across a broad repertory of titles, which helps simplify copyright compliance and drives innovation. To support unique licensing needs around the globe, CCC offers the Multinational Copyright License, the VG WORT Digital Copyright License, the JAC Digital Copyright License, and the CLA & CCC Joint Multinational Copyright License. CCC’s RightFind suite offers a fast and reliable way for employees to confirm rights included in their licenses or purchase just-in-time rights for reusing lawfully acquired content, all without leaving their workflow. CCC’s Copyright Education program features certificate courses, information about copyright protection, international principles, and best practices for licensing.

Outsell regularly conducts quantitative studies on behalf of CCC focused on professional information behaviors and usage patterns among knowledge workers within corporations, including the consumption and sharing of copyrighted content.

Methodology

Outsell designed the questionnaire with input from CCC. The final survey instrument required respondents to spend no more than 15 minutes to complete and contained approximately 20 screens of questions. Topics in the questionnaire covered the following areas: demographics, information-seeking behaviors, content access and consumption, sharing habits and behaviors, and copyright awareness. The study surveyed knowledge workers at companies with global headquarters in these countries: United States, Austria, Germany, United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland, The Netherlands, India, Japan, and Korea. The study focused on the following verticals: Finance/Insurance, Law Firms, Hospitals & Healthcare Providers, Transportation & Automotive, Oil & Gas Extraction, Computers & Electronic Components, Wholesale/Retail, Life Sciences, Chemicals & Plastics, Electric & Gas Utilities, Consulting & Professional Services, Food/Beverage & Agriculture, Aerospace & Defense, and Software & Systems.

The post New CCC Study Finds Executives Create Greatest Risk for Copyright Infringement appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

This year’s Charleston Hub (again) included a significant focus on open access (OA) from the perspectives of both the publisher and library communities. The advent of the OSTP’s Nelson Memo is driving hope, change, and concern. With these impressions still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d share some of my key takeaways.

Subscribe to Open Meets Tragedy of the Commons

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is in the process of branding itself as “equitable OA.” This business model is clearly on the rise. However, for certain buyers, including corporate and governmental libraries, the —let’s face it — charitable basis of the model limits participation. Corporations will not want to pay for something they can get for free and governmental libraries often cannot do so. This does not mean that the model is not economically viable; simply that like all models, it only works in some circumstances. S2O works best with a large academic library base and carries risks, especially when budgets are tight. Moreover, as S2O conditions openness on sufficient library participation on a year-to-year basis, it is also risky for authors who must publish OA as a condition of a grant funding.

Nelson Memo Point 1

The initial reactions to the Nelson Memo have already been well covered in The Scholarly Kitchen. As a foundational point, many publishers and librarians at the Charleston Conference assume that once zero-embargo policies are finalized, compliance will often come from “Green-by-Gold,” a phrase coined by Chef Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. In other words, APCs, transformative agreements, S2O, membership and read-and-publish agreements (collectively “OA Agreements” for brevity) will trend steeply upward as the least-resistance method to ensure compliance with Federal mandates. For publishers, Green-by-Gold is a highly feasible route to recouping investment in articles that, having been peer reviewed, would otherwise compete with the Versions of Record if published for free in accepted manuscript form.

Nelson Memo Point 2

Given Point 1 and the broader concern that zero-embargo posting of accepted manuscripts is simply not sustainable, many publishers are accelerating OA plans, preparing to enter into OA Agreements when they have not previously done so and moving beyond APC-only models. This is not just in the US, but throughout scholarly publishing.  The pressure is being felt everywhere, and I had many, many conversations along the same lines.

Nelson Memo Point 3

Given Points 1 and 2, academic libraries are genuinely worried that they will be expected to pay for increased OA fees and to manage OSTP required mandates without additional resources. The OA Agreements they have entered into with publishers were generally designed and modeled around corresponding authors from a given institution, not all authors. The existing agreements were not designed to carry this additional load. New modeling is needed, as is broader adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and enhanced author workflows.

Nelson Memo Point 4

As noted by Roger Schonfeld during a “Meet the Chef’s” panel, “OSTP policy is not an equitable issue, it is a compliance one. Going forward, grant officers will require a line item for publication fees prior to approving a grant for submission.” If so, this is good news. Some questions linger, however, such as when libraries manage OA Agreements and research offices receive money for APCs, how will payment workflows be managed? Is the answer different for papers published after the grants have been completed? Will research offices provide more direct funding to libraries? Will libraries continue to be the primary point of OA management when compliance (and not collections) is the primary driver of the transaction? Will there be additional funding to cover OA fees, and if not, will the money be deducted from what would have been spent on research itself?

Nelson Memo Point 5

The other implications of a mandate that covers all authors, not just corresponding ones, are not yet fully understood, and are significant. If a physics paper can have 5,000 authors, how do you identify whether one is (currently) at a given institution, especially when Gmail addresses have been used and authors change affiliations? If multiple authors are covered under separate OA Agreements, what is the hierarchy that governs payments? Is the hierarchy the same if the corresponding author is not covered by an agreement or is resource constrained? Where is the author affiliation data housed? Is it updated? Are your PIDs and supporting metadata adequate to affiliate institutions with their related schools, hospitals, departments, and institutes? How are conflicts in policy, payment or data resolved.

It appears that there’s much left to wonder about when it comes to the Nelson Memo. As one librarian said while contemplating these challenges, “Who requested this policy?”

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