2. What Are Intellectual Property Rights?
E. Current Rights Management Methods
Direct Administration
A rightsholder can manage his or her intellectual property by administering it directly. In these circumstances, user requests are made to the rightsholder, who responds to them individually. This method gives the rightsholder complete control over the use and circulation of the work, and 100 percent of the royalties or use fees that may result.
But direct administration places substantial burdens on the rightsholder. Negotiating every license individually is time-consuming. Monitoring infringement requires experience and incurs legal costs. Negotiating international use agreements requires knowledge of international copyright and contract laws. A large number of licenses must be negotiated to make direct licensing of small rights economically worthwhile, but administering large volumes of licenses, each with potentially different terms and conditions, is a difficult undertaking.
Direct administration is also cumbersome for users. Identifying and locating the rightsholder, negotiating individual rights and uses, and managing and administering the rights that are granted can be a difficult task, exacerbated if many rights are being sought from many different rightsholders (as is the case with multimedia products). The onerous nature of this process can be a powerful disincentive for users, who may respond by 1) abandoning their projects, 2) excluding from their projects works by creators who cannot be identified or located, or who will not negotiate acceptable terms, or 3) using works without permission, taking a calculated risk that the rightsholder will not pursue legal action because the resources required to do so are too great to justify the return.
Of course, none of these scenarios is desirable. Abandoning a project because of difficulty with procuring rights runs counter to copyright’s philosophical intent to foster creativity. Excluding content from a project because one cannot locate its rightsholders foils the economic opportunity that copyright offers to rightsholders. Committing a deliberate infringement is perhaps the least desirable outcome for rightsholders. Often when a work is appropriated without the rightsholders’ permission, the rightsholders find themselves without a realistic chance of seeking restitution because the cost of doing so exceeds their means.
Direct administration is usually undertaken by large corporations with sufficient resources to establish legal, marketing, and distribution channels dedicated to overseeing licensing transactions. The software industry licenses its intellectual property in this fashion, with individual software corporations establishing their own in-house licensing bureaus. It is rarely economically viable for individuals to administer their intellectual property directly, especially for small rights, because the time and effort far exceeds the income generated and the distribution that can be achieved. Of late, some individuals (particularly those in the graphic arts) are using electronic networks to facilitate the direct administration of their works. fihile electronic networks can expand distribution, they do not address the other key limitations of direct administration: the current inability to monitor uses, to negotiate a high volume of individual agreements efficiently, to administer charges and payments effectively, and to ease the burden on users to locate and negotiate properties from many different rightsholders.
A. Intellectual Property Rights in the United States
B. A Brief History of Copyright
C. The Nature of Rights in Copyright
D. The Complexity of Rights in an Electronic Environment
E. Current Rights Management Methods
F. The Emergence and Perseverance of Rights Management