The first OnCopyright event from Copyright Clearance Center held in New York this week was a forum established to probe the value copyright in an era of electronic distribution and how to profit from it. Panels ranged from technology, legal and publishing issues across the board. You'll find below links to our events blog here as I complete entries and below that a summary analysis posted after the conference.

• Technology Confronting the Tools of Disruption
• Shifting Perceptions of How You Can Use Copyrighted Materials
• The Lawyers Probe the Enduring Search for Balance
  
• Remixes - Art, Creativity and Ownership

In sum it was an excellent event with really meaty panels, which, though a bit rambling at times, managed to delve deep into very important topics relating to copyright and intellectual property law. At the end of the day I had a chance to speak with Suzanne Vega for a few minutes to ask her about how her cooperation with remixers helped her to extend her brand. She said that it was very helpful, a point that did not come out in the panel and a point that it at the core of what copyright law seems to be missing in general: copyright is not building brand value for original works creators as effectively as it used to.

Ultimately it's not the distribution of copies that's at issue as much as the fact that we have a copyright system that still focuses on the right to distribution of a copy as the primary key for determining when and how the value of content is realized. With essentially free distribution to and from billions of points worldwide this concept no longer scales well as a relatively simple tool to manage content commerce given the traditional method for establishing licensing through contracts negotiated through legal departments.

This problem was underscored in a conversation at the conference with SLA CEO Janice LaChance. Janice defended her panel from the Buying and Selling eContent conference in which prominent corporate librarians bemoaned publishers doing little to address many key issues regarding their business models, especially how they related to copyright. Put simply, the publishing industry has enormous vested interests in managing copyright through traditional legal and business channels, preferring the intricacies of case-by-case dealmaking to the risk of distributing content to the wrong people under the wrong terms.

This emphasis on legal departments as key elements of publishers' fundamental revenue models and opportunistic lawsuits that argue for copyright enforcement on increasingly arbitrary grounds has created an utterly balkanized landscape of kludgey deals and half-considered rulings in dozens of courts that in essence has dismantled much of the value of the once common and simple concept of copyright.

In the meantime the online economy has prospered, not by corrupting copyright but by creating value out of content in legitimate derivative works and in new sources of original authorship which in sum dwarfs the output of traditional publishing outlets. Services such as those from the conference's sponsor Copyright Clearance Center are facilitating the ability of people to apply copyright effectively online in a far more automated fashion for specific items of content. Providing value in context is the true value of publishing, a concept that is conflicting more and more with the mass manufacturing model that drives the production of much of today's copyrighted content. Much of the value of online content for a given audience where infinite supply reigns is fleeting, highly contextual and oriented more towards executing business deals or building relationships.

The fundamental concept of copyright - that creating a temporary monopoly for a publisher based on the premise that control of distribution will sustain publishers - is becoming far more limited in its effectiveness to deliver value. The question is not whether someone should have a right to license their content for use under copyright but rather how they should license it. This is why I have suggested for several years that publishers focus on the concept of context rights rather than copyright. In other words, once content has been distributed, it finds its value most easily. The fleeting moments and contexts in which it becomes valuable are difficult to predict in advance in an online environment and the relationships that will result in those moments harder yet to predict.

What the copyright industry needs to adapt to is a different view of what technology will help rights holders to make the most of content that benefits most from unfettered distribution. I believe that this will lead towards is a new style of licensing that is more fully automated and which uses a variety of predefined models to compensate content creators for their works. The rewards may be smaller overall in many instances in terms of money exchanged, but offering more exploitable brand value over time as people discover not only the value of a particular work but the value of a relationship with the creator of the work.

I applaud Copyright Clearance Center loudly for the courage that they exhibited in assembing this event. It brought together many important players with very intelligent thoughts about copyright and the challenges that it faces. An institution such as CCC needs to embrace the future of licensing content boldly at this juncture to ensure both its own future and the future of compensation mechanisms that can encourage and reward the creation of value through publishing.

Labels: copyright, Copyright Clearance Center, intellectual property, oncopyright

The Guardian notes the release of EMI's first album distributed in a high-quality MP3 format without DRM controls, a policy that EMI will apply to all releases except for music from the Beatles' catalog. Individual tracks will be available for USD 30 cents more than the Apple FairPlay DRM-encoded tracks, though CNET News notes that EMI will continue to make tracks available via FairPlay and will not offer upgrades to people who already own FairPlay content. An entire album goes for GBP 7.99 - that's about USD 16, a typical going price. In sum EMI did the math and realized that there was a fairly specific and predictable amount of revenue loss that could be expected through online piracy and decided that the gain from increased exposure made non-DRM encoded content a cost-effective alternative.

More importantly it gives EMI the ability to move its marketing beyond Apple's iPod and eliminate the artificial stranglehold that proprietary DRM had placed on its online distribution strategies. EMI is now free to manage its sales through whatever channels it sees fit - and in doing so open up more contextual points of contact with the purchasing public. This move is not likely to dent sales of the popular iPod any time soon but with more music being consumed on mobile phones and other trend-setting devices a platform-agnostic approach to content distribution will allow EMI to keep their content in the ears and minds of their audiences more easily - and increase their ability to keep its popularity flowing regardless of the platforms that users opt for.

If there was a DRM scheme that was future-proof and non-proprietary it may have been otherwise but for now EMI has decided to adapt to the economics of users managing their content the way that they'd like to. And in the end that's a good thing for both EMI and their audiences if it makes their content more popular and usable. Hopefully music producers develop more enhanced packaging for their content that adds value to the underlying product and to their knowledge of how it is used and distributed. But until that can be done in a standards-based format the music industry appears to be ready to use existing standards as a way to reach audiences as efficiently as possible.

Labels: EMI, intellectual property, mobile, Trends

As scholarly publishers drag their feet in responding to Open Access challenges to their business model, the Washington Post notes an effort by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to introduce open Web peer review for patent applications using technologies similar to those used on popular social media Web sites. The online system now under development will allow the public to post comments on patent applications and to have those comments rated by their peers, much in the way that social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.ius and Newsvine allow users to chime in on posted comments. Detailed profiles required for comment posters is hoped to dissuade bogus comments from infiltrating the system, though the potential for this is nevertheless acknowledged by the USPTO.

With USPTO officials overwhelmed with an onslaught of new patent applications - 4,000 examiners processed 332,000 applications last year - online peer review methods are a key initiative to help the agency to judge the worthiness of patent applications more efficiently. First up will be tech companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, with an open call for other participants. While scholarly researchers are likely to continue to use peer-reviewed publications from publishers as the principal gateway to vetting their ideas amongst peers the USPTO initiative offers an exciting alternative to traditional peer review methods for serious sci-tech innovations.

No peer review model is perfect, but online content and ecommerce services have accumulated extensive experience in what types of peer review methods are valuable and reliable. The key to moving scholarly publishing forward into more profitable and efficient methods will revolve around innovative approaches to peer review similar in general concept to the USPTO initiative. The key problem with scholarly peer review today is that there are too few peers willing and able to review too much potentially publishable content within the constraints of the existing system. While this does provide a certain degree of quality control, the pressures to publish journals on fixed schedules are in some ways more likely to push questionable research into print using today's peer review methods as methods that don't rely on the production limitations of print services. They don't call it "publish or perish" for nothing, after all.

A more open approach to scholarly peer review similar in concept to the USPTO initiative may have the potential to loosen review bottlenecks while maintaining the quality of the peer review process. The price to pay for this innovation is that such a system would begin to expose who in a scholarly community was really respected by their peers and leading publishers. As in other arenas of publishing the "brand name" institutions associated with quality research may find both their research papers and their scholars not receiving what they may feel is deserved recognition from a system that allows reviewers to express their preferences more openly and honestly than via the more closed process of today's journal-managed peer review processes.

But at the end of the day more open approaches to peer review are going to be necessary to gain the confidence of both scholarly researchers and the markets that they serve. The current PLoS One is a hopeful step in this direction, but the USPTO initiative offers scale that may prove out to scholarly publishers the importance of enabling a more open approach to peer review as a competitive necessity. While not every scientific discovery is likely to be backed up by the USPTO review methodology alone, it may create enough competitive force in the marketplace to jar scholarly publishers loose from their moorings and to consider how the broader marketplace for innovations will seek to have discoveries confirmed as valid in the eyes of their peers. We'll see how this unfolds, but for now consider this a major shift in the peer review process of technologies that's likely to ripple long and hard into scholarly publishing.

Labels: Best Practices, intellectual property, patents, peer review, scholarly publishing, Social Media