McGraw-Hill Sees P2P as Growing Problem
An interview with Government Affairs Director Daniel Duncan
Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has been a major area of concern for the music and movie industries, but much less so for the publishing industry. That’s no longer the case for The McGraw-Hill Companies, says the company’s Director of Government Affairs Daniel Duncan. Copyright Clearance Center recently caught up with Duncan to learn more about McGraw-Hill’s IP program and the challenges the company faces in the increasingly complex digital marketplace.
Excerpts:
Q: What is the single biggest challenge to publishers within your publishing sector today in terms of IP rights?
Daniel: At The McGraw-Hill Companies, our responsibility is to meet the needs of our customers. Those are ever-changing needs, especially now with all kinds of new technologies. Some people want things in a certain format, some want it through an RSS feed, some people want to pull it, some want to have it pushed to them. Always in the back of our minds when we’re trying to meet those needs is our overall and fundamental requirement that we do everything we can to protect our intellectual property. So even though we may get requests from users, for example, to have a digital product deliverable onto a PDA, when we go through the process of making up that business model and delivering that product, we’re going to consider what restrictions we need to put on that product. We don’t necessarily want someone downloading content to a PDA and then being able to download from the PDA to their home computer and send that information out to 300 of their best friends.
Q: What forms of infringement are of utmost concern to McGraw-Hill?
Daniel: As a general matter, it’s piracy and infringement occurring on the Internet. That includes not simply piracy of digitally created and delivered products and services, but also of our print products. That is becoming an increasing problem for us in terms of postings on P2P sites, and information that we find posted even within some corporate sites. We see some of our newsletter materials going up there. We issue a lot of statistics from our S&P (Standard & Poors) branch and from some of our sector publications that cover the energy, construction and aviation industries. From time to time, we see those materials up on sites where we will have supplied content to the person as a licensee, but that license did not include the rights to post our content on a public Web site. The problem we have with unauthorized postings by individuals, especially on P2P sites, is growing much more rampant and is of much greater concern to us than it has been in the past.
Q: What type of content are you seeing in P2P networks?
Daniel: Mostly our textbook materials. We’ve also seen instances overseas where some of our materials are being uploaded into formats that we’ve never produced on our own, especially electronic. And they’re being offered for sale at student centers, on bulletin boards where people know students gather. For example, in one Asian country, there was a notice put up on a student center bulletin board that simply said “if you want to get [one of the major textbooks in the world for a certain kind of medical science], call me and I will give you a download on your PDA or whatever portable device you may have.” We never produced that book in that format. I don’t know how they got their hands on it. This is another one of our concerns in terms of piracy of our materials. Since we never produced it in that format, we don’t know how they made changes to get it into that format. We also have no idea what may have been left out or added to that text that we never printed, which, especially in terms of medical information, can be very harmful to the end user.
We also have a testing bureau that does a lot of the standardized tests for the No Child Left Behind Act. Those materials have also been pirated and posted on P2P networks. And we also face what a lot of other publishers face, and that’s people selling things on eBay when they don’t have the right to sell them. We’re not talking hard copy, we’re talking digital copy in most cases.
Q: You’ve talked about corporate and individual misuse of your content. What about the academic market? What’s at the center of most infringement cases involving universities these days?
Daniel: We have concerns generally about what is going on in the academic market. Of all of our customers, libraries and universities tend to be the ones that are most cognizant of copyright rules and regulations and try their best to abide by them. However, we have problems with e-reserves. It’s certainly a difficulty for us when we see some of our materials semester after semester after semester being put on e-reserves where, in essence, they are taking the place of a textbook or an article or something else they really should be asking permission for and that should be used in a classroom setting, not through an e-reserves system at the library. I think we, and other publishers, suffer generally from a presumption among the student population in the United States that copyright infringement is no big deal. If something comes into their e-mailbox, or if they see something on a Web site, then it’s all legal and fine and they can do with it what they will. That is why we have worked closely with AAP in the association’s education campaign, especially targeted towards universities and libraries as a way of making sure that students understand the problems that are created not just for us, but potentially for them if this kind of piracy is not stopped.
Q: The open access bill introduced by U.S. Senators John Cornyn and Joseph Lieberman has definitely caught the attention of academia and publishers. If passed, would this legislation affect McGraw-Hill?
Daniel: Our concern with the Cornyn legislation is not so much with its direct effect on our business, but with it as a precedent for what it will mean further on down the line for all kinds of information. At the moment, the focus is on medical and health information, but my understanding is that there is nothing in there that would prevent the same provisions from applying to any kind of information. So any information that is created under a government grant and published would have to be made available to the public, free of charge, by the government directly and within 6 months of the publication date. From our perspective there are a few things missing from that equation. The government does not have the clearest notion of the amount of value-add that is done by publishers in order to make information that was originally done under a grant actually understandable and consumable for the general public. But there’s nothing in the bill that recognizes that. From my understanding, there’s nothing in the bill that would prevent them from putting in the free-published version all the value-added information provided by the publisher when they publish the information that came from the government grant. The second problem is that it’s very difficult sometimes to parse those things. Part of the skill in the publishing field is taking basic information and enhancing it either through further commentary, better organization, or additional materials that help add value to the basic information. None of that seems to be taken into consideration in this legislation, and that shows where the slippery slope may be. We have signed a letter to the Senate expressing our concern on the Cornyn legislation. That was done earlier this spring by a number of companies.
Q: Looking ahead, what are some of the things McGraw-Hill will be working on in relation to copyright?
Daniel: The McGraw-Hill Companies have begun a concerted intra-corporate effort to help get our arms around the entire piracy and infringement problem. We’ll be focusing on education of our customers and our employees about what infringement is and what it means in the marketplace. We’ll be looking at developing systems for reporting and quickly responding to reports of piracy. And we’ll be working on additional technologies that we can use either to prevent piracy of our materials directly or track piracy of our materials that happens on the Internet.
