I will be co-teaching a workshop in rights management for DAM (digital asset management) at the Henry Stewart DAM conference in Chicago on Thursday, September 11.  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 is another iteration of the workshop that Seth and I did in April in NYC.)

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!  (Use registration code EA100 for a discount.)

UPDATE: This workshop has been cancelled.