A newly released independent review of UK copyright law suggests that legislators reform intellectual property law to bring it into the digital age. Andrew Gowers, former editor of The Financial Times, led the government-commissioned study.

“I do not think the system is in need of radical overhaul,” Gowers states in the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, which was released December 6th. “However, taking a holistic view of the system, I believe there is scope for reform to serve better the interests of consumers and industry alike.”

Among the report’s recommendations, Gowers suggests:

• Educational provisions for use of content in distance learning
• An “orphan works” provision to allow the use of content when no rightsholder is found
• Exceptions for “private copying” of all types of content for research purposes and to allow consumers to shift purchased content across different formats, such as transferring music from a CD to an mp3 player
• Exceptions for libraries to copy archive materials and to change the format of those copies to sustain archive records

The independent review also called for stronger penalties for online piracy, reduced litigation costs through mediation and other measures, and maintaining the existing 50-year term limit for copyrights on sound recordings.

England is one of several countries that have decided to take a second look at their IP laws, with a particular focus on how they address digital content use. Australia, for example, is now close to passing The Copyright Amendment Bill 2006. Much like Gower’s recommendation to allow format-shifting of purchased content by consumers, Australia’s legislation would also permit that type of personal use.

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Faculty must obtain rightsholder permission for the use of electronic course materials just as they would for print content. That message was delivered to Cornell University faculty and students earlier this month in a new set of copyright guidelines jointly drafted by officials from Cornell and the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

The new guidelines focus on the distribution of copyrighted course materials on electronic reserves, faculty and department Web pages and course management systems. University officials published the new document about six months after they were first contacted by AAP concerning alleged copyright violations.

“In April, I wrote to you about concerns that had been raised by the Association of American Publishers regarding what it perceived to be widespread copyright infringement at Cornell in connection with the provision of electronic course reading materials to students through electronic reserve reading and course web pages,” wrote Provost Biddy Martin in a memorandum to Cornell deans. “Since that time the University has sought to resolve this matter in a manner that protects the faculty’s legitimate interests while averting the threat of litigation.”

In a public release posted on AAP’s Web site last week, AAP President Patricia Schroeder stated the publishers represented by her organization are pleased with Cornell’s response to their concerns.

“AAP hopes that Cornell’s actions will set an example for other colleges and universities and provide them an opportunity to review their own practices and institute similar guidelines,” said Schroeder.

Copyright expert Lolly Gasaway, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of North Carollina, says she saw Cornell’s new guidelines and was pleased.

“I think the guidelines are extremely reasonable,” said Gasaway. “I was actually pretty happy with them.”

She predicted that Cornell’s work with the AAP will affect other colleges and universities and some will inevitably follow suit with similar guidelines.

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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.

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There are new players in Hong Kong’s campaign to stop illegal sharing of music and movies. They are young, Internet-savvy, and their compensation comes in the form of a merit badge. They are Boy Scouts.

About 200,000 “youth ambassadors” from the Boy Scouts and other youth groups have been enlisted to help in Hong Kong’s Youth Ambassador against Internet Piracy Scheme. As part of the campaign, participants pledge to respect IP rights and report suspected instances of infringement they witness online.

Hong Kong officials started the campaign as a pilot program last February. Soon after, they unveiled a new Boy Scout merit badge for IP rights and protection created in collaboration with the Motion Picture Association. Hong Kong’s Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau then officially launched the youth ambassador program in a public ceremony in July.

“We believe that apart from enforcing the law, it is also very important to gradually change the culture and the mindset of our young people to realize that illegal uploading and downloading is piracy,” said Joseph WP Wong, secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology. “It is simply shoplifting and is wrong, never mind whether it is criminal or not.”

Hong Kong Commissioner of Customs and Excise Timothy Tong reported in July that during the five months of the youth ambassador pilot program, Customs received more than 1,200 reports of alleged infringement by users of BitTorrent, a file sharing application. More than 60% of the unauthorized content sources had been removed. Most of the remaining reports proved invalid.

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Here are some easy ways to spread copyright awareness on your campus. These tips were provided by Susie Quartey, associate director of the Copyright Licensing Office at Brigham Young University.

1. Be patient. Develop official policies and practices and be patient with administrators while they review them for approval. Without their support and that of other campus leaders, your efforts will not be fruitful.

2. Be compliant. Follow copyright laws and campus policies that govern your institution and ensure they are readily available to your campus community.

3. Be respectful. Promote the five inherent rights of copyright owners: reproduction, display, performance, distribution, and derivative works. Remind faculty, staff, and students to follow the golden rule—treat the copyright protected materials of others as you would have your own treated.

4. Be creative. Spread awareness of copyright in a variety of creative ways on your campus: Create an online tutorial; develop a short video that can be shown at key locations on campus; hang posters or place placards on tables in the food court or in the library; give away pens, bookmarks, or other items at copyright information displays; or send an email annually to faculty, staff, and students. You are only limited by your own creativity.

5. Be excited. Share your enthusiasm about copyright. Energize a subject that many fear or do not understand. If you are excited, your enthusiasm will spread and people will replace their ignorance with understanding.

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Intellectual property (IP) piracy often conjures up images of street vendors selling knock-off sunglasses and Gucci handbags. But large-scale violations of IP rights across virtually every industry are on the rise. The World Customs Organization estimates global trade in illegitimate goods totals more than $600 billion. Faced with mounting losses in jobs, sales and consumer safety, business leaders have joined forces to demand more aggressive enforcement of IP rights around the world.

To understand the magnitude of the problem, consider the data. The U.S. Trade Representative estimates U.S. companies lose about $250 billion per year and about 750,000 jobs as a result of IP piracy worldwide.

IP piracy includes commercial-scale unauthorized reproduction of software, movies, music, books, fashion products, industrial products, consumer goods, and other products protected by copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret laws. Counterfeiting compounds piracy when these unauthorized reproductions bear the logos and names of the original producers. In its most tragic cases, inferior parts and products resulting from piracy and counterfeiting have been blamed for property damage, injuries and even deaths.

The nation’s automotive industry alone has suffered an estimated $3 billion hit from illegally reproduced auto parts, according to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). In fact, in 2004, CBSnews.com reported, “The auto industry has found enough counterfeit parts to build a whole car, including brakes made of compressed grass and wood sold in American stores.”

The ICC reported in 2005 that in a survey of more than 1,100 corporate and academic economists in 90 countries, 83% “agreed or strongly agreed that counterfeit products and IP theft are among the more pressing problems facing business today.”

Companies Are Fighting Back

Leaders from more than 130 companies have joined forces to shine the spotlight on the global problem of IP piracy. Part of the group’s mission is to pressure governments throughout the world to better enforce intellectual property rights. Their platform is Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP), and its membership list is a “Who’s Who” of the business world—Dupont, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Nokia, and Time Warner are just some of the participants.

“In our digital age, anyone who has a new invention, a creative idea or a technological breakthrough is at risk of a rip-off, whether it be in the automotive, entertainment, pharmaceutical, software or any other intellectual-property-dependent business sector,” stated BASCAP member Bob Wright, vice chairman of GE and chairman and CEO of NBC Universal, in an Op-Ed column in The Wall Street Journal last November.

In addition to lost growth opportunities, companies affected by IP piracy may face liability costs from inferior-quality products, loss of consumer trust, danger to the health and safety of their customers, a financial drain from product recalls, and an inability to earn compensation for the time and money invested in research and development. Businesses that violate IP rights may also gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

“Counterfeiters take full advantage of the fact that someone else paid the upfront money for research and development expenses; all counterfeiters have to do is to copy the product,” explains Pfizer on its Web site’s FAQ section about counterfeits.

Legislators React, Tighten Enforcement

While business leaders lobby countries throughout the world to tighten enforcement of IP rights, U.S. legislators are considering several bills to combat counterfeiting and piracy. In March, the “Stop Counterfeiting in Manufactured Goods Act” was signed into U.S. law to close a loophole in existing legislation. Previous laws banning counterfeit products failed to restrict fake labels and packaging of those products. The new legislation closes that loophole, and requires convicted counterfeiters to relinquish all profits from their illegal practices.

U.S. government officials have threatened trade implications against countries considered the worst violators of IP rights, such as China. In addition, they have included IP rights protection as a part of their Free Trade Agreement negotiations with other nations. Governments throughout the world are tackling the problem as well, from raids in the United Kingdom and India to new anti-piracy laws in France, to a commitment from Chinese leaders to prosecute offenders more aggressively.

How Can You Protect Your IP?

While government leaders address IP rights violations on a broad scale, there are measures your organization can take to better protect your own intellectual property. IP attorney Maury Tepper, a partner at Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice, PLLC, suggests five key steps:

1. Identify exactly what your intellectual property is.

2. Educate employees periodically about the importance of protecting your organization’s IP and about respecting the IP of other companies.

3. Provide additional training for frontline employees, such as sales and customer service representatives, on what to look for in customer complaints and sales trends to help detect counterfeiting in the marketplace.

4. Educate the public about the value of purchasing legitimate products, and about the fact that piracy costs jobs and has been traced to funding terrorism.

5. Engage your corporate counsel in the beginning stages of product development to anticipate any new intellectual property you may create and ways to register and protect it.

Tepper emphasized that IP piracy and counterfeiting is not an issue just for major companies. “If you have employees and you have ideas, you have IP,” he said. “It is as simple as a customer list, or trade secrets – some old family recipe or manufacturing process – these may not be high-tech, but they are subject to IP theft.”Read more tips from Tepper on ways to protect your intellectual property.

Additional Reading

• ICC Report “Intellectual Property: Source of innovation, creativity, growth and progress”

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Intellectual property attorney Maury Tepper, a partner at Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice, PLLC offers the following tips to help you better protect your copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property.

• Register your trademarks and copyrighted works with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. This agency maintains an IP rights program to intercept illegally reproduced products before they enter the country. “You need to register your IP with Customs for them to be able to stop shipments,” said Tepper.

• Train U.S. Customs agents on the types of counterfeiting you’ve seen and what to look for. The agency offers guidelines for training modules.

• Look for partnership opportunities with trade associations and business alliances to pool resources for public awareness campaigns, and enforcement efforts. These organizations also take the pressure off individual companies that don’t want to offend their own customers.

• Educate your employees about the value of your organization’s IP, and of getting your corporate counsel involved early on in product development to better ensure your IP can be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office or the Copyright Office as appropriate, and then with Customs for protection.

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An interview with Mick Archer

Two years ago, AstraZeneca said goodbye to its traditional library system and opened a highly-efficient virtual library. The result is a streamlined resource that allows the company’s 60,000 employees around the world to get, use and share information anyway they need. Mick Archer, virtual library portfolio manager for AstraZeneca’s Global Information Science and Libraries division, recently talked with Copyright Clearance Center to tell us how it all came together.

Excerpts:

Q: Where does your library sit within AstraZeneca?
Archer: Within Global Information Science and Libraries, although that’s all changing, because we’re being merged with our Discovery IT department.

Q: How is your library system structured?
Archer: AstraZeneca has eight main research sites. Three in Sweden, two in the U.K., two in the U.S. and one in Canada, and each of those has a library. In the past those libraries were run reasonably autonomously. Two years ago, we started a project to become a totally global organization and to put all the budgets together for all deliverables. We divide our services into three portfolios. One is for the purchase and delivery of journals, documents, books, and monographs. The second, our Published Information service, delivers databases, news, and other content. And in our third portfolio, Information Science and Analysis, information scientists conduct searches and analyze information for the scientists on site. Those three portfolios fall under Global Information Science and Libraries.

Q: Describe AstraZeneca’s virtual library.
Archer: It is taking what you would have found in a traditional library five years ago and making it available electronically. In a library, you’d see a reference desk. In our virtual library, we are developing a virtual reference desk function. Instead of shelves to put books and journals on, we offer information access over the intranet. We deliver books, journals, and document supply electronically. We spend over 90% of our budget on electronic journals, and about eight or nine percent we spend on paper.

Q: Why the need for the virtual library?
Archer: We’re a global organization with eight major R&D sites and lots of marketing companies worldwide, and all want access to published information. Delivering eight separate journal subscriptions to eight separate libraries is very inefficient, when you can deliver one set of journals, one set of electronic books, and one document delivery service, all managed once. Under appropriate licenses, you can supply it to the whole company, 60,000 people. So definitely the push was efficiency and effectiveness, efficient use of budgets, and of our staff time. In the past we had nine people working on document delivery. Now we’ve got three people serving the whole of the company. It’s quite efficient.

Q: What is your goal for this system?
Archer: Our aim is to make delivery of full text transparent to the user. If somebody wants a dozen articles to support their research work, we want to say we’ll deliver those to your desktop. You should ask for those papers and get them delivered. We’ve got a system that does that. However, the copyright issues with different methods of delivery are different. So for an electronic journal, we can just give the link and you can access it as many times as possible. With secure electronic delivery from the British Library, you can only print it once, and you can only access it a few times for a limited period. You cannot share that document. You can’t send a link to somebody else and say “this is an interesting article, read it,” whereas you could if it was an electronic journal. We need to be able to tell employees what they can do with those documents and how they can get more rights. We need some easy way to actually give them a way of sharing those documents legally. That’s why Rightsphere is exactly what we need to go on top of this sort of delivery. We don’t need to worry about whether we’ve got permission in our subscriptions, or pay-per-view permission or document supply. They can have the same rights for all those documents.

Q: Is it challenging to get all the content you need from publishers in electronic form?
Archer: It is an issue. On the journal side, we’ve got licenses from about 60 publishers and that covers about 80-90% of our journals. To actually become totally electronic, there are hundreds of publishers that perhaps have one or two journals, and the effort to try and get all those journals on board is going to be disproportionate to the benefits. On the book side, electronic books are still not as advanced as electronic journals, so there’s still a lot of work to do there to find out exactly how we’re going to deliver these.

Q: What has your new system done for your end-users?
A: Most library and other information services are end-user self-service now. It means people can get access to material instantly, and that means an improvement in research productivity. Our service can deliver any document people require to their desktop instantly through an electronic journal. We use British Library mostly for document supply and they send their secure electronic delivery documents directly to people’s desktops in less than 24 hours. That is a huge improvement from our previous situation. In the paper days, we sent an order to a document supplier and got a paper copy within three to four days at best, sometimes it was longer. We also use a linking system from an outside source for all of our databases. We’ve developed a system to include a shopping cart related to that system, so people can do a search, select a dozen items and go straight to the full text. We are pushing things back to the end-user, and we see that as a benefit. We don’t have a third party who is delaying access to the documents.

Q: What do you consider your greatest innovation?
A: Our document delivery service. With three people, we are supplying documents worldwide to AstraZeneca within about 17 hours. To add Rightsphere will be a huge innovation, to let people buy the rights to do what they need to with those documents, relatively simply and legally.

Q: How has your role as a librarian changed?
A: It’s become more and more global. It’s very much a global organization, so I need to know about issues in other countries. I’m not just dealing with U.K. law and U.K. practices. So there’s a lot of change.

Q: What do you see for the future of AstraZeneca’s library services?
A: The copyright and licensing function will increase. There are a lot more issues there, particularly to use the rights we’ve got effectively. We’ve probably got more rights than we use. It’s very difficult to advise people worldwide, so when in doubt we say “no, you can’t do this.” To have something like Rightsphere that could actually advise people about what they can do, helps us free up some of those rights that, perhaps, we’ve been keeping the lid on. On the library side, I don’t see us reducing purchasing services much more than we already have, because we have outsourced most of the traditional functions – book purchasing, journal purchasing and document supply. You’ve got to have a certain number of staff to manage those outsourced deliverables. I don’t see the library staff reducing anymore. We’re down to an efficient operation now.

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Research has shown repeatedly that most people want to respect the copyrights of others. They simply may not know how. Here are some easy ways to educate your organization’s employees on the proper ways to use and share third party content.

1. Tap free online resources. Post a link on your corporate intranet site to The Guide to Copyright for Business Professionals, an easy-to-use tutorial on the fundamentals of copyright law.

2. Include copyright in business ethics policies. Your organization probably has an ethics policy that requires employees to be diligent in protecting the company’s intellectual property. Consider adding a copyright section to your policy to stress the importance of respecting the intellectual property rights of others. In addition, let everyone within the organization know about the revised policy, via e-mail, your company intranet or other communication methods.

3. Enroll managers in online training. Management often sets an ethical “tone” for the rest of the company. Encourage your organization’s managers to enroll in one of Copyright Clearance Center’s online seminars. They will walk away with a better understanding of the right and wrong ways to re-use copyrighted content, and they can share that information with their staff.

Contact us to sign-up to receive notices of future online seminars

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Copyright expert Lois Wasoff, an intellectual property attorney who specializes in publishing-related issues, offers the following tips to help you better protect your copyrighted content.

1. Include copyright notices. Make sure your content contains appropriate copyright notices.

2. Stay abreast of encryption technology. Understand and use encryption and other technologies when you’re distributing your work in digital form. Current examples (among many others) include: Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Reader, Palm DOC and Mobipocket for e-books, SealedMedia for online materials, and Copyright Clearance Center’s Rightslink for automated secondary licensing from your content.

3. Streamline permissions. Make it easy for people to navigate your permissions processes so that they can reuse portions of your work legally. If you make it too difficult for them, they’re likely to use your content anyway without authorization.

4. Play well with others. Use collective licensing solutions that make it possible for people to use your work legally and for you to be compensated for the use of your work.

5. Be creative, and flexible, in defining new business models. Sometimes, as the music industry learned, piracy can be a kind of very expensive market research. If your customers want your products in a particular form, try to find a way to get those products to them legally, on business terms that work for you.

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