I will be co-teaching a workshop in rights management for DAM (digital asset management) at the Henry Stewart DAM conference in NYC on Wednesday, April 30. I’ll be partnering with Seth Earley, CEO of Earley & Associates. He’s a longtime colleague of mine as well as a highly regarded expert on metadata and content management.
This isn’t about DRM. This is about how media companies — and others who handles copyrighted material in their businesses — need to manage information about rights to content and the processes that revolve around rights, such as permissions, clearances, licensing, royalties, revenue streams, and so on. Some large media companies have built highly complex processes, systems, and organizations to handle this, while others are still using spreadsheets and paper documents.
Rights information management has come of age over the years as a function within media companies. It has taken a while, but it is being recognized as a revenue opportunity as well as an overhead task or a way of avoiding legal liability — not just for traditional media companies but also for ad agencies, consumer product companies, museums, performing arts venues, and many others.
The subject of our workshop is “Creating a Rights Management Roadmap for your Organization.” We’ll be discussing real-world examples, business cases, and strategic elements of rights information management, and we’ll be getting into various aspects of how rights information management relates to digital asset management. Attendees will be asked to bring information from their own situations, and we’ll be doing some exercises that will help attendees get a sense of what they need to do to implement workable practices for rights management. We’ll touch on business rules, systems, processes, metadata taxonomies, and more.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Henry Stewart (a publishing organization based in the UK) has been producing the highly successful DAM conferences for many years. I’ve seen the event grow in attendance and importance to the DAM community over the years. Come join us!
And speaking of events: I’m pleased to announce October 1 as the date for our next Copyright and Technology London event. Details to follow.
Copyright and Technology 
WE NEED A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY (Time To Decriminalize Music File Sharing)
As you know music fans visit web sites where they download folders filled with songs from albums in the MP3 format. Then, one at a time, they play the songs they downloaded in WinAmp or Real Player.
If the music fan likes a song, he adds the song to his iTunes Player. If the music fan dislikes the song he drops it into his recycle bin.
Over time, the music fan will build some number of playlists in his iTunes and he will accumulate a substantial number of music files.
Here comes the hard part. Someone, a software engineer, has to write a software package purpose built for use by Apple and Amazon and all the on line music companies. When the music fan links up with the package on line. The software scans the meta data in all of his music files, his MP3’s (could be FLAC files also).
First, the software package breaks the music fans music files into two
main categories:
1. MP3’s showing a receipt for payment in the meta data.
2. MP3’s not showing a receipt for payment in the meta data.
Next, the software package presents a bill at say 97 cents a song to
the music fan. If the fan pays with a credit card, the software package adds a receipt to the meta data of all of the MP3’s in question.
In this way we can decriminalize music file sharing and, at the same
time, restore the profit margins to the music industry.
(Feel free to run with this thread as if it were your own)
Have A Nice Day!