High-Tech Tools Can Make Copyright Laws Easier to Respect

In 2003, a Baltimore jury forced the financial services firm Legg Mason to pay $20 million in a copyright lawsuit that was brought by Lowry’s Reports. The offense? Legg Mason had bought a single copy of a Lowry market report and distributed it to as many as 1,300 of its stockbrokers and clients. Eight years earlier, Texaco paid a seven-figure settlement to six publishers in a case centering on whether it is “fair use” for a researcher to copy journal articles without getting permission from their publishers. And four years before that, Kinko’s shelled out nearly $2 million to settle a suit brought by eight publishers who alleged that university “course packs”—sets of readings from different sources that are bound together for the benefit of students—infringed on their copyrights.

In each one of these cases, the accused were not intentionally committing a malicious act. Their real crime was being ignorant of copyright laws. In fact, they were probably unaware that their actions touched in any way on issues of copyright, which in fact extend to the unauthorized copying and distribution of published material.
 
A not-for-profit organization called the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), based in Danvers, Mass., was formed in 1978 in order to ensure that all published information—everything from scholarly medical research articles to popular songs—is used and shared legally and with ease. Today, that company’s web-based applications and tools are allowing tens of millions of people worldwide in corporations, universities, law firms and government agencies to ensure that they are using published materials legally.

If the folks at Legg Mason, Texaco and Kinko’s had been aware that their actions entailed copyright issues, they could have taken their inquiries to the CCC or a similar organization, and at the very least been able to determine whether they were in fact flouting the law. If each of these companies were faced with a similar task today, they would be even more fortunate—because innovative companies specializing in content retrieval and repurposing are developing new ways for companies to keep track, in ever more detailed ways, of which pieces of published information that they have in their possession are restricted by copyright.

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Source: Corp Magazine