Digital transformation of the standards sector has massive potential for change, yet this effort can introduce new challenges, including how to address evolving intellectual property needs. The ISO/IEC SMART standards initiative, for example, has ramifications across the industry as it seeks to model the way forward.

On 4 May, at 11:00 AM EDT, CCC is hosting a free webcast as part of our “Workflow of the Future” series, focusing on Sustainable Business Models for Standards Development Organizations. This program gives standards development organizations (SDOs) an opportunity to share their views on supporting new user demands while delivering innovative, sustainable solutions that work for everyone. In discussion with moderator Jonathan Clark, panelists include:

• Silona Bonewald, Executive Director, IEEE SA OPEN
• Leslie McKay, Senior Manager, Digital and Information Products, SAE International
• Joan O’Neil, Chief Knowledge Officer, ICC
• Simon Powell, Director of Product, BSI
• Hans Arne Rykkelid, CEO, Standards Digital AS
• Ivan Salcedo, Director, Quix Innovation Services

This multi-part Workflow of the Future webcast series, with support from the US International Trade Administration, was designed to facilitate important conversations on critical topics related to standards, particularly related to intellectual property protection, copyright, and sustainability.

The post Workflow of the Future: Sustainable Business Models Webcast appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Is the ability to have a flexible work environment here to stay? Employees would like to think so. In Deloitte’s marketplace survey on workplace flexibility, 94% of respondents stated they would benefit from work flexibility with the top gains being less stress and more work-life balance. 

Indeed.com recently posted a blog touting the benefits of remote work. Employees mention the ability to work from anywhere, a better work-life balance, and saving time and money commuting as some of the top reasons that they prefer remote work.  

The most recent Information Seeking and Consumption Study reflects this as well, with the latest data indicating that the work environment has undergone a seismic shift – and that this evolution is expected to continue. This study which has been developed by CCC in partnership with Outsell, Inc. since 2007, further shows that the transition to hybrid and remote work has created new dynamics for information sharing. The ways employees engage and collaborate with published content have evolved, with a corresponding shift in enterprise knowledge workers’ behaviors and attitudes around published content. 

New Dynamics for Information Sharing 

This shift in behaviors and attitudes is important to note with published content being at the heart of innovation. Across job roles and verticals, employees reported that weekly access to at least 7.5 publications was critical to their job.  

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. The latest Information Seeking and Consumption Study surveyed over 600 knowledge workers from global organizations across 14 verticals. Why is the fact that remote and hybrid workers are sharing more often and with more people [fig. 1] so important to note? In one word – risk. The more third-party published content is shared, the higher the risk of copyright infringement. 

The Rise of Collaboration Tools and Risks 

Outsell Inc’s analysis, using data from the 2023 study, stated “…digital replaced physical for all interactions. Gaps in communication emerged and the data shows that users overcompensated.” As people in companies small and large adopted collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, sharing became “nearly unfettered.” 

The adoption and use of collaboration tools, video conferencing software, and cloud-based file storage services remain strong as many businesses have moved to hybrid and in-person environments. The use of collaboration tools as the preferred method of sharing work-related information more than doubled since the 2020 survey, while email attachments dropped by about 15%. 

Downloading content through any tool makes a new copy of that content – and copying often requires permission. With the rise in the use of collaboration tools, more people may be downloading content from those tools, creating new potential instances of unlicensed sharing, and putting their organizations at risk. 

Education and Resources – Helping You to Address the Challenges of Information Sharing  for Your Remote Workforce 

Ordinary content exchanges that come so naturally in the digital world may increase the risk of copyright infringement, leading to costly lawsuits or settlements and affecting brand reputation. You can support compliance for your remote workforce with education and solutions. Here are five things you can do: 

1. First, if you don’t have a copyright policy, CREATE one, or UPDATE your current one to reflect the way your organization works and shares information today – in person, fully remote, or hybrid. CCC provides guidelines for creating a policy as well as a sample policy to use as a model. 
2. PUBLISH the policy in a central location, like your intranet, and make every employee aware of it and its details, including guidelines for using externally published materials. 
3. PROMOTE awareness of the policy by sending periodic reminders about how employees can access it and why they should. 
4. SECURE needed permissions, annual licenses, and copyright-compliant content workflow software for easy compliance. 

By taking steps to balance employee reuse of published content with a strong compliance and licensing program, your company can leverage published content sharing to help support collaboration and drive innovation.  

Read more: 

The Paradox of Executive Behaviors in Content Sharing and Copyright 

Reckoning with Remote Research 

Managing Scientific Literature Access Across a Remote Workforce 

The post The Great Global Work From Home Experiment and How it Changed the Way We Work Forever appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

“That’s a 10% increase over 2021, when total Overdrive circulation figures topped half a billion for the first time,” reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer.

“There are other services in the digital library space – hoopla; bibliotheca; Baker & Taylor – but OverDrive has an Amazon-like hold on the library e-book market,” he tells me.

Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.

The library lending data represents OverDrive’s activities at more than 88,000 libraries and schools in 109 countries worldwide. In 2022, OverDrive officials say, more than a million new digital titles were added to the catalog, along with 73 new content partners.

OverDrive also reported that ten library systems in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Germany all surpassed one million check-outs in 2022. The Los Angeles Public Library, which topped the list, became the first library system to surpass 10 million digital circulations in a year via the OverDrive platform.

The post LA Public Library Tops in World for Digital Lending appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

On each of its two days, PageBreak held an open, “un-conference” session at which anyone could pitch an idea to those attending. The first day saw the meeting break out into seven sessions, with a mixture of lively, inquisitive, and hopeful sessions that were necessarily summarized too quickly. The second day saw five more sessions, with equally fast report-outs. It was a bit of a whirlwind, with folks participating in a session and then trying to understand the ideas pouring out of several groups they had first heard about only an hour before.

Ideas were collected throughout the meeting on post-it notes, the innovator’s first technology of choice. I contributed four ideas*, ultimately choosing to pitch “How do we innovate in ways that don’t get our ideas (or us) killed?” The short-form title was “Innovating to survive.” About a dozen people joined a lets-stand-around-a-room-with-no-chairs session.

Some participants in that session shared stories of innovation failed. We started with an HTML-based workflow solution that could generate multiple physical and digital versions from a single source file, withdrawn because it required the company to maintain skill sets in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Another volunteered a five-year old blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) startup that withered until it left the book industry and courted other sectors. We heard about an ebook delivery solution that made full use of the EPUB specification that struggled because major ebook platforms ignore the more innovative, interactive parts of the standard, and publishers use those platforms as the least common denominator.

In the un-conference session, conversation turned to ways we could foster innovation within the industry, rather than be subject to the work of those outside it. We heard that a community focus might help, building solutions that serve a segment (like academic or scholarly publishing) that is open to or pressured by new ways of working.

Advisory boards, higher-level executive sponsors, and a focus on even small, near-term wins were all mentioned. Returning to a theme evident in discussions about diversity, equity, and inclusion, the importance of investing in people and skills was raised.

Perhaps the most sobering observation likened publishers to mining companies, with both seeking to convert raw materials into a product. “If you’re selling the equivalent of a better mining machine to a publisher, you have a shot. If it can save them money and turn out more ore faster, they’re interested. But if you want to talk about new uses for the ore, or a new way of delivering it to their buyers, they shrug their shoulders. It’s not interesting to them.”

Hearing these stories, it seemed clear that the hope rooted in the Books in Browsers and Tools of Change conferences more than a decade ago has subsided. PageBreak represents a new stake in the ground, but its promise is something we have to make happen outside of conferences and small-group discussions. As organizer Peter Brantley observed at the end of the first day of PageBreak, “Here we are, again”. We’re all older, hopefully wiser, but when it comes to innovation in book publishing, it’s still not clear what we do with the time that is given us.

* My other three ideas (not discussed) were: “If the future is in niches, what parts of publishing need to change?”; “How do we secure the skills we need to innovate in a tech-phobic industry?”; and “How can the shift from scarcity (print) to abundance (digital) be used to inform and spur positive changes in workflows?”

The post Innovating to Survive appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Unlike Juliet’s rose, which cannot lose its fragrance if identified as a hyacinth, standards do lose potency when not recognized for their true nature. The term does define them, because across industry sectors, mutually agreed upon standards follow strict procedures for writing and development—including extensive innovation, research, and testing phases—often taking years to move from conception to publication. They’re not just “documents” or “publications.” 

For a rule or regulation to bear the label “standard,” two unique and significant qualifications must be present:  

1. A recognized authority has established it, and 
2. There is general consent or consensus from diverse, voluntary, and cooperative stakeholders who confirm through a balloted process the delineated format and precise wording used when it is codified or published.  

The standards consensus process is what gives the standard its unique qualities. The process provides the sponsoring authority the means to weave, measure, and cut each standard as it addresses a specific need—alleviating confusion, offering continuity, and in general, benefiting our lives in numerous ways across multiple fields and industries.  

Today, as each wave of technology innovation moves society forward, calls to change this traditionally complex development cycle have emerged to speed up access to standards content or make it available in new ways. These calls for innovation are viewed by some as placing the value and relevance of standards in jeopardy. Some manufacturing and engineering leaders want to integrate and/or aggregate standards data and content into proprietary end products, potentially placing the standard’s distinguishing elements—authority and consensus—at risk and threatening to dilute their value. How should SDOs heed calls for changes to developing their digital rose—the standard document type—while allowing it to remain unique, identifiable, and valuable?  

Prior to the 2008 economic recession, many SDOs operated as self-sufficient, industry-specific publishers within change- and/or risk-averse environments, often with self-contained, restrictive, and rigid infrastructures that utilized inefficient or outdated production and print-based distribution models.  Competition between SDOs within the same or similar industries often outweighed the perceived value of engaging in collaboration. Today, championed by international, independent, governmental, and non-governmental standards bodies, SDOs are collectively realizing new strategies to promote the sharing of knowledge, improve development timelines, support innovation, and provide solutions for ever-evolving global markets and economies. 

Through the advent of new digital distribution market streams, a much-needed impetus for evolution and transformation has emerged. SDOs across all industries have experienced considerable growth with the establishment, adoption, and adherence of universal protocols for production and distribution. International support for the development of structured methodologies for maximizing PDF format, XML tagging (NISO-STS), identification markers (ISBN, ISSN, DOI), digital and eBook delivery, and numerous “smart” standards initiatives have led to essentially a “standardization of standards,” and placed the standards development industry at the forefront of an incredible technological opportunity, a position they cannot afford to fall back from.  

As SDOs begin retooling operations, every change that maximizes delivery speed and optimizes output must also preserve the intrinsic elements that elevate standards above and beyond “best practices.” To achieve this involves preserving SDOs’ recognized authority and the voluntary, cooperative, collaborative consensus approval processes that are crucial for sustained relevance. Bearing equal weight in consideration is the importance of protecting content integrity when published and when the content arrives on the user’s screen; addressing each helps the SDO ensure the safety, security, interoperability, compatibility, efficiency, scalability, and reliability of the content. Throughout the workflow, SDOs are focused on protecting the distinctions inherent to the standards format that define its value— and making the rose smell sweet.  

As users call for greater accessibility to smart standards data and content to capitalize on global market opportunities, SDOs are carefully considering where to draw the line between ensuring greater use of standards and maintaining the SDO’s own institutional integrity. How much transformation can SDOs support without relinquishing authority and consensus? How can they navigate this evolution while protecting their legacy and reputation? How can they support new use cases without cannibalizing existing revenue? How can they maintain control of standards data and content when aggregated into emerging customer systems and new workflows?  

For those SDOs who respond successfully, I see no reason, should fair Juliet ask, “Does a digital rose still smell so sweet?” why the answer would be anything less than “Yes!” 

In my next post, I’ll explore answers to the questions raised above and share more perspectives on changes in the standards industry and opportunities ahead. 

The post Is a Standard by Any Other Name Still a Standard? appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Even if someone has not heard of standards, they have none the less benefited from their outcomes through enhanced design, development, and service technologies. Yet for most people, standards development processes are semi-invisible, despite being a critical element of thousands of regulations threaded across all areas of modern society. Occasionally they come into the light, such as when the US Department of Education endorsed the Common Core State Standards Initiative, but most of us live our lives oblivious to their existence, value, or impact. In this post, the first in a series about standards, I’ll share my thoughts on the value of standards and on innovative approaches taken by standards development organizations, or SDOs.

Standards are synonymous with rules, regulations, criterion, benchmarks, rubrics, or metrics. Society would not operate as we know if not for these mutually agreed upon best practices and technical specifications. Standards have been crucial for advancing manufacturing and technology development during each previous industrial revolution.

The digital evolution driven by Industrial Revolution 4.0 requires extensive enhancements and innovations. These in turn affect current applications, systems, and operations and surpass conventional processes – all of which are guided by standards. Each technological iteration requires users to adopt new modalities to fully realize the benefits afforded by each turn of the evolutionary cycle. This has never been truer than with the advances of smart manufacturing and autonomous systems, data-driven enterprises, artificial intelligence initiatives, machine learning, the Internet of Things (I0T), etc.

To meet these “future of” business opportunities, industries across the board are currently transforming to serve ever-changing global markets and needs, which in turn requires developers to accelerate the pace for delivering technological advancements, product designs, R&D, and product developments to “future proof” businesses. According to Tatiana Khayrullina, Consulting Partner for Standards and Technical Solutions, Outsell Inc:

“The concepts of “content” and “data” are converging, and new formats (e.g., video, audio) are becoming more dominant. At the same time, reproducible results are becoming more and more important.”

Regardless of industry, users desire greater accessibility to SDO content with a growing desire to integrate and /or aggregate standards data into their own proprietary end products. Should SDOs acquiesce, could we be on the verge of realizing tomorrow’s future, today?

Simon Klaris Friberg, Senior Librarian/Information Consultant at Rambøll, an engineering consultancy headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, argues that the evolution of standards requires altering the current “document centric” approach.

“It’s very much still a traditional sort of paper-based use and not materially different from that conducted in generations past. References to standards content are framed in the paper world – with pages, footnotes, paragraphs, and sections, despite the content existing in PDF and XML format online. As a 21st century engineering organization, Rambøll and its engineers are coming to see a need to move to a more content centric use of standards content.”

Achieving this level of accessibility would require SDOs to transverse the barriers confronting the end users; in turn requiring the SDOs and other developers, along with intermediary distributors, to significantly expand the access to and interconnectivity of standards data. (Friberg 2022)

Based on my interaction with SDOs, I’m seeing differing comfort levels as they consider and identify how best to engage with current and new customers as Industrial Revolution 4.0 content providers. They’re seeking ways to bridge the growing gap between the practical considerations surrounding standards development and their customers’ rapidly evolving data needs and contemporary manufacturing / supply-chain realities.

Those SDOs with the greatest potential to lead in the face of growing global market sophistication are transforming their capabilities from document-centric models into transparent, open access models that allow for on-going operational process, infrastructure, and technology improvements and upgrades.

Concurrently, these SDOs are carefully managing the practicalities of their own industry, including achieving content management efficiency, adapting pricing models, monitoring cybersecurity, defining, and licensing digital assets, adhering to legislation compliance, policing piracy, protecting copyright and intellectual property, maintaining technological relevancy, meeting mandated availability requirements, and addressing the impact and expectations of native users. Their active contemplation and development of new “use case” strategies require greater cooperation and collaboration among users, distributors, publishers, and other SDOs. For these organizations, “because we have always done it this way” is no longer an operational mantra.

In my next post, I’ll share my observations about SDO efforts to preserve the uniqueness of standards while moving move their organizations and their industry forward.

The post Realizing Tomorrow’s Future Today with Standards appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Roberta Katz is co-author of Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age, recently out from the University of Chicago Press. She is a senior research scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an interdisciplinary research lab at Stanford University.

While most takes on Gen Z are unforgivingly judgmental, describing lives permanently distracted by social media, Katz and her colleagues in anthropology, linguistics, history, and sociology offer a richer, more optimistic view of a confident, collaborative cohort.

“The digital revolution has come on with unprecedented speed. It has presented us with unprecedented scope and scale of information. And most importantly, it has kind of given a rocket boost to how we communicate.”

Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.

Best of VOC: Gen Z Explained

According to her team’s findings, Gen Zers say relevance in communication is critical to them.

“They’ve grown up with such an abundance of information, they had to get good at sorting what they needed from what they didn’t. It’s not always an absolute good to be dismissive of something that you don’t think is relevant. But it comes from having learned how to deal with an abundance of information.

“The internet is all about communication,” Katz explains. “And if you think about the importance of communication to human life and the fact that we have this extraordinarily powerful new tool, you begin to understand why this revolution has us all kind of with our heads spinning.”

The post Best of VOC: Gen Z Explained appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

More and more, people trust information less and less.

This is true wherever news comes from. Traditional journalism organizations and digital-native social media networks alike face a formidable challenge—breaking through the cloud of misinformation and overcoming doubt and suspicion.

In 2019, Adobe, with its partners Twitter and The New York Times, announced the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) to provide consumers with more information about the content they’re seeing and to help them become more discerning about media.

The CAI now collaborates with hundreds of representatives from software, publishing, and social media companies; human rights organizations; photojournalism; and academic researchers to develop content attribution standards and tools. In June, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters became the latest members of the CAI community.

“It’s becoming an increasingly confusing digital media landscape out there, and consumers often have difficulty understanding where content comes from, whether it’s been manipulated—and if it has, to what degree?” explains Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education for the Adobe-led CAI (see photo at right).

“Traditionally, the approach to these problems has been detection, which is to say uploading suspect digital files to programs that look for telltale signs of manipulation,” he says.

“Instead of trying to detect what’s false, we decided to look at it from the other end of the argument, which is proving what’s real. To that end, we are working to establish the provenance of digital file types—the basic trustworthy facts about the origins of a piece of digital content,” Lyon tells me.

“We’re working together with camera manufacturers and smartphone manufacturers to incorporate this technology into their devices at production. In a couple of years, when you buy a hardware capture device, it will come out of the box with this CAI technology installed. You can then choose to activate it if you’re interested in your content having more provenance data … to ensure its veracity.”

In Lyon’s vision for the CAI, permanent, open source metadata about an image or any other media file type fields will send a critical digital virtue signal.

“What we strive for is ubiquity, that this will become the industry standard, and that consumers will expect to see some provenance data associated with images or video or audio or other digital file types,” he says.

“And by having some visibility into the provenance of those file types, [consumers] will be able to better understand what it is they’re looking at, where it came from, who published it, and what might have been done to it.”

As a photographer for Reuters and the Associated Press, Lyon won multiple photojournalism awards for his coverage of conflicts around the world. In 2003, he was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University before becoming director of photography at the Associated Press, a position he held until 2016. Under his direction, the Associated Press won three Pulitzer Prizes for photography as well as multiple other major photojournalism awards around the world.

In the 1980s, Lyon shot photographs with manual SLR cameras and developed film in darkrooms. Over the four decades since, digital technology has transformed media entirely, from its creation to its distribution. With a background in the analog world and experience in the digital one, he recognizes that news and information benefit from doubts and even suspicion.

“We should be very careful to always check the source. Who is reporting this? Who is saying this? What might their agenda be? What relationship might they have with a particular aspect of a news story or things of that nature? I think it behooves us to be discerning consumers of content. And I think that the technology that we are developing will help us do that,” he says.

“I’m optimistic for the future. Technology has played a major role in storytelling since its inception and will likely continue to. That it’s getting more sophisticated and more complicated does create some challenges, [but it] also creates significant opportunities for engaging more effectively and efficiently with viewers who might be suffering from digital fatigue.”

The post Content Authenticity Initiative: The Solution to Information’s Provenance Problem? appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The post Copyright & Technology 2022 Preview appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

• Michael Healy, Executive Director of International Relations, CCC, & Chairman, ISNI International Agency (ISO 27729), and
• Guilaine Fournet, Head of Sales and Business Development, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 

To view a recording of the webcast, click here.

Michael Healy started off the conversation with a fundamental principle: copyright stands at the heart of the creative economy. Keeping that economy healthy and vibrant depends not only on the creators’ ability to create, but on their motivation to continue creating. Copyright is fundamental to that dynamic because it provides creators with control over whether and under what terms they authorize the use and re-use of their works.

Healy described basic concepts about licensing, emphasizing how it offers a market mechanism to make certain rights available to users and describing the difference between primary-use and secondary-use licensing. Primary licensing, such as a subscription to a journal or a database, is the dominant market model, and is usually a one-to-one commercial relationship between the content owner and content user. In addition, for several decades and in many parts of the world, there has been a vibrant collective licensing model in operation for secondary rights. These are rights other than purchases or subscriptions of content, such as use of text in internal postings, on intranets, and through email, and for the use of music on radio and streaming platforms, for example. As Healy noted,

“Hundreds of millions of dollars flow annual through…collective licensing of text… [Collective licensing] protects rightsholders’ content, rewards the rightsholders and delivers real value to users in terms of authorized usage and a means of collaboration… At CCC, collective licensing is what we’ve been doing for about 40 years, and in that time, more than 20,000 rightsholders have chosen to work with us.”

When asked by moderator Clark why more SDOs aren’t engaged in collective licensing mechanisms, Healy offered, “The challenge is one of understanding and awareness. Many SDO professionals are unaware that the types of licenses offered by CCC are voluntary, that it’s not some leap of faith into the dark, and that they are also non-exclusive, meaning they are complementary to what you would otherwise do to make your products visible in the market.”

Healy offered three key takeaways about collective licensing for SDOs:

1. 1. Collective licensing is proven. It complements the standards publishers’ own licensing and sales efforts; it doesn’t compete with them.
   2. Collective licensing permits very specific types of re-use – the kinds of re-use that business users make every day without thinking – and therefore helps protect standards from infringement.
   3. Collective licensing is an important source of revenue for many SDOs to supplement existing subscriptions and other types of primary sales. 

Our next panelist, Guilaine Fournet, explored how collective licensing supports the efforts of the IEC. Since its founding in the early 1900s, the IEC operates with a vision of creating a safer, more efficient world. Fournet noted that the IEC takes several steps to protect its intellectual property: 

• • Each PDF sold by the IEC includes language in the footer on every page in bold red type that reminds the user of their rights and obligations under current license/subscription terms. It includes the end-user name, company, and number of users. 
  • In addition to the terms listed in the end-user license agreement (EULA) and in the organization’s subscription agreement with the IEC, the IEC Webstore presents a quick reminder about what rights are conveyed with a given action — what is permitted and what is not. 
  • The IEC shares with its customers a short brochure it co-created with ISO that presents copyright and standards in layman’s terms. 

Clark asked Fournet how the emerging concept of Smart Standards may have an impact on business models related to IP protection. Among other qualities, Smart Standards offer “granular” access to standards content such as enabling access to a particularly meaningful section of a document. Fournet noted, “The questions that come up about Smart Standards are both technical and legal. What are the consequences, and what is the liability for example, if [an SDO were to] provide a [single] clause but, just before that clause [in the text] there was language that restricted the upcoming clause? If you only have the part that appears after the clause, then you won’t know about that restriction! How do you make sure the end users will have the information that delivers the integrity in the information?

Though nothing has been decided yet, we are looking at some proposals, some offering access to just some parts of the publication, where [the user] can still read the full publication in some way, so the user can still do the due diligence needed.” 

At this point, a member of the audience asked where the IEC stands with regard to Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect its IP. Fournet noted that the IEC does not deploy DRM for retail sales, and offered these remarks:

“We considered [DRM for retail sales] but decided to trust our customers. [It’s] a big leap of faith, but that is why we highlight the terms of use in the purchasing process and with the red text in the body of the PDF. We know they will think twice. The other aspect is we view it as punishing your paying customers. They will have to install a plug-in, and your IT department may lock your computer so you can’t install that. In terms of customer service, we heard this from members that use DRM, and they faced a backlash from the end users: their customer service was overwhelmed.”

Fournet also told the audience that a colleague in the standards industry recently reported to her that their use of DRM resulted in a revenue decline of 15% due to all the restrictions that came with it, including limitations on access and printing. (A member of the audience noted in the chat that at least one provider of DRM solutions does so without requiring a plug-in.)

Clark asked Healy and Fournet to speak to the workflow of the future: “Looking three to five years ahead, what changes do you see with the business models? In terms of accessibility of documents – what if an organization creates a product that embeds standards content and sells it to their users; by providing this new product, how is licensing managed?”

Healy answered, “We have to find the right balance between revenue and access, so that end users are able to do what they would like to do with those products while protecting the IP of the rightsholder…a critical point is the last observation that Guilaine made for both rightsholders and their partners – we have to continually look for ways to take the friction out of this value chain. The history of our ecosystem is one of continually evolving business models. We should look to meet licensees where they want to be met – within their normal workflows. I don’t see why the future shouldn’t be good and prosperous for us all. We need to be willing to experiment and meet the user where they are.”

Clark also asked Fournet: “What were [the IEC’s] main reasons for [joining a collective license with CCC], and what are the opportunities you see as being part of a collective license?”

Fournet replied, “I see it as a win-win. It’s a solution for us to be able to have additional channels. My team here in Geneva — we are nine people to cover the planet, which isn’t realistic. That’s why we have partners who are key to the distribution of applications and products… it’s another tool in the toolbox.”

A productive discussion featuring knowledgeable panelists and a thoughtful, engaged audience made for a successful event. We’d like to thank the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration once again for their ongoing support in this event series. We look forward to our next standards event and hope to see all of you there. 

Do you have suggestions for our next event? Please email your ideas to Andrew Robinson at robinson@copyright.com 

To view the first webcast in our Workflow of the Future series, click here. 

Standards Development Organizations: Learn More

The post Part 2: Workflow of the Future: Copyright & Standards appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.