PW: CCC to Launch Web Rights Service

The Copyright Clearance Center, a nonprofit licensing agent for text reproduction rights, has developed a new digital rights management system for copyrighted material online. The as-yet-unnamed service will be sold through a new for-profit company that will be spun off from CCC within the next few months. Long-time CCC customer Dow Jones & Company, which publishes online editions of the Wall Street Journal and Barron's, is the first publisher to contract for the new service.

CCC's new licensing program is intended to cut back on copyright infringement on the Web by providing users with instantaneous permissions. CCC chief information officer Woody Johnson said the service integrates "the licensing technology with the content. "The technology will actually reside on the site, in or near the content, article or photograph. "Licensing should be very easy, in 0ne or two clicks," said Johnson.

The service will also provide publishers with accurate data on which articles are requested the most. The information could prove useful for determining future content and for providing advertisers with clear information about a publisher's customers. Users will be able to view their permissions history online.

As it is currently configured, there is no cost to the user other than the permission fee charged by the publisher. CCC will take a percentage of the transaction. "We're not charging for the software, and there's no charge to the user," explained v-p of marketing Liz Johnson, who stresses CCC's 22-year track record in rights management. Currently, CCC represents more than 9,600 publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors and creators. In the fiscal year ending in June 1999, it distributed $49.5 million in royalties.

J Acevedo, director of reference services for the Wall Street Journal and Barron's, also has high hopes for the new system, which is currently being beta-tested. Dow Jones plans to go live with the new system in the next two months. "Permissions is too labor intensive," he noted. "The goal is to get people to comply with the copyright law. If it's easy, they'll do it." The numbers seem to back him up. Starting a year ago, Dow Jones launched a Web reprint service and, according to Acevedo, it's already earned more than $1 million.