Publishers' "article tools" make it easy for users to share, save, and post web content. Yet these tools may lead users into unintentional copyright breaches. iCopyright's Article Tools solution offers a way for publishers to track, permission, and potentially monetize every use of their content beyond simple viewing. Is this the future of copyright compliance in the world of "good enough" content on the open web?

Important Details: iCopyright, a firm that provides systems for protection of digital content, recently released a white paper about publishers' "article tools" and content piracy. Article tools are the buttons seen on many web sites that allow users to do something else with the content they are viewing, such as e-mail, print, save, post, share, and comment. iCopyright reports results from its recent study about users' behaviors with these options to encourage adoption of its own new Article Tools system, which can protect publishers and information providers from unfettered redistribution of their internet content and improve their ability to monetize information posted on the web.

iCopyright's study showed that most users interpret article tools as green lights to reuse or redistribute associated content freely and without further consideration of additional copyright or licensing requirements. In fact, the study showed that 95% of users do more with content than merely read it as posted on news and information web sites and that such activity is widely mixed across personal and business use. This indicates a misapprehension on users' part of what is compliant use, and also points to loss of revenue opportunities for publishers.

iCopyright's Article Tools includes a variety of capabilities, including instant licensing methods for users to make it easy to comply with copyright: allowing publishers to place contextual advertising within articles that users choose to share; showing copyright and licensing information that travels with each article that a user redistributes so that recipients can see whether the item is pirated or legitimate; and making it possible for publishers to syndicate Article Tools notices to third parties, like aggregators, so that the protections remain with the proprietary content as it moves into others' platforms.

Implications: Vendor portfolio and information managers have long worked with publishers, information providers, third parties, and their organizations' legal counsels to address copyright compliance around the use of paid content. While licensing and other rights management efforts may not always be a sure-fire guarantee against compliance missteps, the intention and controls to do the right thing are in place. More recently, shrinking content budgets have led some centralized buyers to reconsider licensing premium content, especially in the news arena, and opt instead for "good enough" alternatives freely available on the open web. Vendor portfolio managers who opt for free news or other content may be easing their budget pressures but adding risk around copyright compliance.

As iCopyright's research shows, many news and information sites provide content sharing tools along with free information, yet the terms of their legitimate use may be buried somewhere else on the web site. Users may unwittingly redistribute, post, or otherwise reuse content through these tools in a way that is outside of publishers' terms and conditions and out of compliance with copyright.

iCopyright's Article Tools help publishers capitalize on different usage of their freely available content, and they make sense as a way to track and enforce permission while eliminating some of the compliance risk. But sharing is really the goal of content creators and users alike, and is the driving force behind the web. Piecemeal oversight seems counter-intuitive to free-flowing exchange. As Outsell noted in a recent Insights piece (Connecting the Dots on Copyright, April 24, 2009), we think compliance will evolve to a world where publishers will be compensated or protected not by tracking every use of their work, but by some larger framework that funnels revenue back to them via estimates of downstream usage. In the meantime, vendor portfolio and information managers will need to guide their users through the compliance maze on the road to "good enough." Solutions like iCopyright's "Article Tools" can help meet users do the right thing at their point of need.

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