Avoid Copyright Infringement: Five Ways to Protect Your Business from the Consequences

Copyright infringement has never been easier or more tempting. Social media sharing and the demands of generating content for blogs, websites, and other forms of communication are too easily fulfilled with a simple 'copy and paste' function.

Because of this, rights and permissions management is becoming an important consideration. And copyrights and other forms of intellectual property are becoming more closely guarded and hotly contested than ever. For copyright protection in the digital environment, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was enacted in 1998 to balance the interests of internet service providers and copyright owners when copyright infringement occurs online.

U.S. Copyright law provides remedies for infringement in the form of injunctions, impounding and disposition of infringing articles, damages and recovery of costs/attorney's fees. Legal costs can be high, especially for patents, which can run into millions of dollars. Copyright and Trademark cases tend to be less technical, yet even those can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Companies are at greater risk, therefore it's important to implement safeguards to protect your business.

Five Ways to Protect Your Business from the Consequences of Copyright Infringement

1. Never allow employees, contractors or anyone working on behalf of your business to directly copy and paste or reproduce anything created by somebody else. While this should go without saying, it's better to have a clear written policy, particularly for those engaged in blogging, social media or other regular online activities.

2. Understand copyright law. It protects writing, photographs, drawings and other creative works. Copyright is automatic, but you have to register with the U.S. Copyright Office to sue someone who infringes on your rights. Copyright does not protect facts, nor does it generally protect underlying ideas. That means you can express your own thoughts about ideas and facts from other works. However, those other sources must be referenced and credited. For example, you could draw from one of my other blog posts as long as you give me credit, generally through a link to the original page.

3. Understand public domain. Public domain works are appealing because they are not copyrighted, making their use both legal and free. Public domain works are governed by authorship or age. Regarding authorship, everything created by employees of the U.S. government in the course of doing their work is in the public domain. Also, the creator of a work can give blanket permission for others to use their work. The concept of Creative Commons was developed for usage in these cases. Regarding age, works published before 1923 are in the public domain, however some exceptions do apply.

4. Understand Fair Use. The concept of fair use or fair dealing applies to teaching, critiques, comments (including those made online), research, reporting and other critical commentary. The purpose is to make sure copyright laws don't cross the line to infringe upon freedom of speech. It does not grant the right to use fair rule as a guise to freely copy and paste such commentary.

5. Establish policies, systems and tools to safeguard your organization from copyright and other IP infringement. Because individuals violate copyrights and legal use of other igital assets, it's important to have written policies, and to guarantee enforcement throughout the organization with technology and procedures to back them up.

LAC Group provides a comprehensive array of information and digital asset management consulting services, including rights and permissions management. The rights agencies we work with include ASCAP, BMI, MPLC, SESAC, and the CCC as well as similar agencies outside of the U.S. We provide our clients' users with a customizable branded web-based service that offers authenticated users access the means to determine rights and securely procure copyright permissions online. You can contact us directly if interested in learning more how we can help your organization.

Do we need a Digital Asset Management System? And other DAM questions!

Companies and other organizations that hear about Digital Asset Management (DAM) sometimes wonder whether they need a DAM system. (Just as they enjoy the word play of the DAM acronym!)

Since Digital Asset Management assessment includes lots of other questions, I thought I would address a few of them here. I welcome you to add comments regarding your own unanswered questions.

What exactly is a digital asset? 

A digital asset is any form of content or media formatted into a binary source, categorized into three major groups: 1. Textual content; 2. Images;  3. Multimedia.

Beyond these categories, the distinguishing factors include a couple of important caveats:

• The digital asset captures information with value to the organization that’s worth keeping, using and reusing.
• The organization has the right to use the digital asset. Since digital information is easily copied and replicated, this is an important factor.

How are digital assets used?

Digital assets are most often used in creative departments, yet digital assets have value and use in a variety of ways, especially in today's web publishing and social media era (however digital asset use is moving well beyond the creative space into all aspects of the business):

• Historical purposes, for archiving information related to the timeline of the organization.
• Branding purposes, for company logos, positioning statements and other brand information.
• Marketing purposes such as collateral or images for use in blogging or social media.
• Sales purposes such as standard sales presentations.
• Monetization 

The list could continue on, depending on the nature and size of your organization.

What does a Digital Asset Management system do?

Digital Asset Management technology allows you to store digital asset files along with their metadata, or the ‘data about the data’ contextual information that can be mapped to a variety of searchable fields for fast, easy retrieval. These systems generally include security, rights management, support for a wide range of file types, advanced search methods and versioning capability.

What is the difference between Digital Asset Management and Content Management systems (CMS)?

Digital Asset Management focuses on the asset itself, including metadata or contextual information that enables logical storing and easy retrieval of the asset. Content Management Systems focus on integrating digital assets into content for publishing in the required media format, generally for web publishing though CMS can apply to other media as well. DAM systems store digital assets that are often used in CMS applications to create content, and the larger technology vendors include interoperability between them.

What does it cost the organization if we don’t have a DAM system?

Implementing a Digital Asset Management system can be costly, not only the technology itself but the processes and people to make it work. Yet the costs associated with not implementing a DAM system can also be significant:

• Compensation for staff and outside vendors to create the digital assets.
• Expenses related to the purchase of stock photography and other digital assets.
• Time wasted looking for the assets, or not knowing of an asset that could be used.

Multiply this by days, weeks and months over many employees and the costs quickly add up.

Should we invest in a Digital Asset Management System?

This final question depends on how many digital asset files you have now, how much it’s growing, how they are being used and what you are missing out on by not being able to use these digital media files in marketing, sales, customer service, business development, product development or any other business function.

It’s often said that a digital file is only a digital asset when it can be easily found and used. Otherwise it’s just another collection of stored bits and bytes.

LAC Group offers a range of Digital Asset Management services, from the evaluation and assessment of needs to vendor selection and contract negotiation to permanent or temporary staffing for archiving, research and more. For those of you with DAM systems in place, we can counsel you on trends and best practices and consult with you to make sure you are getting the most out of your digital assets

Why Business Intelligence Matters, Part 2: Big Data

Last week I talked about the research aspect of business intelligence, saying that for the best researchers, look to librarians. Trained and experienced library science professionals know where to look and how to uncover the most salient information on any topic, including business topics.

This week I will talk about the other half of the business intelligence equation, the digital data itself. Business intelligence looks at both external and internal data, sources that are growing so fast and so exponentially that a couple of business terms—Big Data and Digital Asset Management or DAM—have been coined as a result.

Big Data and Digital Asset Management

1. Big Data refers to data sets that are so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process and gain meaningful access to them using traditional data processing applications.
2. Digital Asset Management is the process of centrally organizing and storing digital information in rich media formats like video, photographs and presentations.

How much data are we talking about?

• According to IBM, 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. That equates to the creation of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
• According to Mary Meeker of VC firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in her latest release of her infamous ‘Internet Trends’ report, there are now 2.4 billion Internet users around the world and still room for growth.

Meeker's slide about the creation and sharing of digital information globally on the internet echoes the statistic shared by IBM:

While this refers to the world of internet users on the entire planet, more than likely the information being produced within the business universe of your company, your markets and your industry would show a similar trajectory.

Another interesting development shows an emerging class of ‘digital media’ which is data! In the context of her report, this data refers to user-generated content like product reviews and personal trip details or mapping info, most of which is being created on mobile device applications. 

Digital Information’s Exponential Growth: What it Means to Your Business

I can summarize these data trends into two key points:

1. The potential of Business ‘Intelligence’ can never be realized without the ability to access all that digital information in a manageable, meaningful way.
2. The ability to do Point 1 depends on competent research and organized systems and processes for storage and retrieval, aka Digital Asset Management.

Big Data and Digital Assets are at the core of LAC Group’s mission and purpose of helping our clients manage information in the most useful, economical and meaningful way.

The data show that we have a lot of work ahead of us!

LAC Group Research Capabilities

If you’re wondering where you can find a librarian for your business, LAC Group provides skilled, trained library staff on a temporary or permanent basis. Follow this link to read more about our Rapid Research Solutions.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) Capabilities

LAC Group can help you set up the right processes and systems to organize and archive your company’s digital assets for easy retrieval.

Follow this link to learn more about our Digital Asset Management services.

Follow this link to “10 Ways to Make or Break a Successful DAM Implementation”, an article in our latest newsletter by Phil Spiegel, our Digital Asset Management expert. (Or as we like to call him, our ‘DAM Director’)

Internet Trends presentation

 Follow this link to view Mary Meeker’s complete Internet Trends presentation.

Why Business Intelligence Matters, and Why Librarians Should Do the Research

Business Intelligence, often referred to as BI, is a worthy endeavor when done right.  BI incorporates systems, technology and processes that allow a company to gather, store, retrieve and analyze corporate data from all operational areas:

• For CEOs, Business Intelligence plays a key role in strategic planning.
• For CFOs, Business Intelligence supports financial processes like budgeting and forecasting.
• For CMOs, Business Intelligence can reveal insights on markets and products.

I could continue through every business function, but you get the point. For all managers within an organization, Business Intelligence can help them make better decisions.

Business Intelligence Obstacles

The increasing volume and velocity of data being generated within even small companies has become overwhelming. According to IBM, we humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day!

For Business Intelligence, multiple software systems make it difficult to retrieve information for timely and meaningful analysis. Silos of information and corporate hierarchies make it difficult to get a complete picture. As a result, you have lots of information being generated and often not so much intelligence that really helps the business.

Even with Business Intelligence systems in place, technology can only do so much – the final link, and most critical one, depends on people. 

• The right researchers who can process and retrieve data in a way that’s useful to decision makers.
• The right managers who can use the information in a way that’s meaningful to the business.

LAC Group’s Business Intelligence services focus on the first bullet, a piece of the puzzle that is often overlooked and under-appreciated.

Why the Best Business Intelligence Researchers are Librarians

Why would you put a librarian on a Business Intelligence project? Because success depends on research access and discoverability of information, which is the primary role of librarians. LAC Group was founded as Library Associates Companies; we know the value that trained librarians can bring to corporations for Business Intelligence and other research requirements. We have developed a unique, multifaceted competency around that value.

Our core strength has always been information handling: acquisition, organization, delivery, dissemination and research. Our reference desk and research specialists are available for work in various arenas, including Business Intelligence. Our flexible staffing solutions and 24/7 virtual research support allow us to be responsive to any business need, anywhere around the world.

Business Intelligence: Real or Hype?

Business Intelligence has become a hot topic that has some companies implementing systems, people and processes to make sure they have it covered. Meanwhile, other companies wonder if it’s another business buzzword delivering more costly hype than real value.

I believe the difference between Business Intelligence hype and value lies in the people. Without managers who can glean insights and act upon them, there is no value. And without skilled researchers who can retrieve and deliver data in a useful way, the nuggets of information those decision makers need will remain hidden. 

That's why for your Business Intelligence project, consider adding a librarian to the project team.