The
Rights Stuff
Permissions Departments
Get More Bang for Their Buck
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (SEPTEMBER 2004)
Never
known for its glamor, the permissions department has
been getting a facelift and slowly gaining status as
the legitimate, income-generating department it has
always been. Its doing its fair share to boost the collective,
otherwise sagging coffers of rights departments that
have been hit by the retrenchment and subsequent mergers
of book clubs as well as the globalization of publishers.
Recent permissions increases — however moderate or hard
to pinpoint — are partly attributable to technological
advances. In-house databases with built-in contract
templates and outsourcing to the incomparably efficient
Copyright Clearance Center have streamlined the
permission-granting process, which has led to more fulfilled
requests, and in many cases, larger permissions income.
“What we’re seeing now is incremental changes and experiments
in automating permissions requesting and granting processes,”
says Bill Rosenblatt of the digital rights newsletter,
DRM Watch. “Once publishers recognize the positive
effects of those changes, they’ll be more likely to
invest more heavily in them, in terms of both process
and infrastructure.”
Perhaps, but at this juncture this segment of publishing
is hardly standardized. At most houses, each request
requires many considerations: The author’s clout? Length
of quoted material? Prestige of the textbook or anthology?
Size of first print? Some big writers retain the right
to say, “Nay.” As one rights executive explained, “Hemingway
permissions are going to cost more than others.” And
some requests are denied for no apparent reason.
In some houses, it may always be viewed as a Sisyphean
task providing little reward. Off the record, one major
publisher declined to acquire the pricey rights and
permissions component when implementing an otherwise
systemwide computer network. And at Random House,
Tom Allen, Senior VP Finance, admitted that permissions
have not yet been incorporated into the company’s new
rights management system (RMS), which applies the company’s
SAP programming language to the rights department’s
workflow. Like many others, RH is using a decade-old
database to sort its permissions, though it intends
to incorporate permissions into the RMS in 2005. “Because
permissions is still a high-volume, low-value area,
it doesn’t have our biggest attention right now,” Allen
said. “They will always be one-shot deals. And we’ve
seen what people (trade publishers and colleges alike)
want to pay for permissions go down, as budgets get
squeezed.” Eventually, even permissions will be part
of the streamlined RMS, which the company touts as so
cutting-edge that other companies may consider buying
it. “The beauty is that it works across the board, so
we’re working with consistent information throughout
the company,” says Teri Henry, Director of Rights
Administration.
Most of the larger publishers began looking to technology
to ease the laborious permissions process about 10 years
ago. When Faith Freeman Barbato, HarperCollins
Director of Permissions, began in 1993, she says,
“Permissions were still being done manually. They were
rolling contracts into typewriters, with multiple copies.”
Shortly thereafter, the new database was up and running.
“It will be 11 years on Sept. 15. I know because I’ll
never forget that date. It changed our lives,” she says.
The turnaround time for granting permission dropped
from as much as six months to an estimated four to six
weeks. Though the department must still do manual research
for new titles or titles that have not previously drawn
permissions requests, research is only done once per
title; once it’s in the database, it’s there for good.
The information is exported into the UK-based Bradbury
Phillips’ rights database, and HC’s accounts department
uses the BP system to record permissions receipts, chase
for overdue monies, and export the monies to its Author
Royalties system. (Yale University Press, Open
University Press (McGraw Hill), Holtzbrinck Group
and Time Warner also use Bradbury Phillips’ permissions
system.) “Our permissions increases have been pretty
steady. Not dramatic. Very occasionally we increase
fees very slightly. And because of the efficiencies,
the requests we can process has gone up,” Barbato says,
adding that each request is still considered on an individual
basis, taking many factors into account. “The exception
is fees for educational photocopying, which are standardized,
and are based on a per-page rate.” And for those who
care, Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men
is right up there with E. B. White for permissions
requests.
A similar permissions database was created in the late-1990s
at Oxford University Press, and shortly thereafter,
in 2000, the rights and permissions departments were
joined. “It makes much more sense to have them together.
We are all bringing in revenue,” says Marjorie Mueller,
Director of Subsidiary Rights. Oxford has seen a substantial
increase in permissions, specifically from the textbooks
and coursepacks, says rights and Permissions Operating
Manager Bill Smith. But, thanks to its custom
database, which stores all pertinent copyright and permissions
contract information — from what rights the publisher
retains (and those the publisher doesn’t own) to author
splits — new contracts can be sent “without reinventing
the wheel every time.” Oxford’s previous 90-day turnaround
time is now more like three weeks. Jeff Corrick,
who worked briefly in Doubleday’s permissions
department and then freelanced for other big houses,
combined that experience with his programming knowledge
to make the database, which he calls an “idiot-proof
way of not only storing rights data, but letting anyone
clear a request.” If a request is made, and the publisher
doesn’t have rights, the system refers the person to
the right place. Corrick is the man behind Random House’s
soon-to-be-obsolete database, as well as similar systems
at Doubleday, Penguin USA and WW Norton,
and he continues to update and maintain them on a freelance
basis. “I built it to operate the way a permissions
department functions, in a way they are used to,” he
explains. One client company told him it would have
had to hire more employees to deal with recent permissions
increases, if it weren’t for the system. For publishers
still living in the dark ages, Corrick is accepting
clients (cjeffer@brainlink.com).
Houghton
Mifflin, which also uses a database to track permissions,
has been hit with a lot more requests for children’s
literature for the classroom during the past five to
10 years, and consequently, increased permissions income,
says Debbie Engel, Director of Rights. Permissions
Manager Ron Hussey has also noticed a rise in
the request for electronic rights, which now make up
about 15% of the requests. What’s high on the request
list? Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Jhumpa
Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Engel points out
that technology has played another key role: the use
of the Internet has led to “greater amounts of information
to more people, and it has made everyone more aware
that copyright laws have to be followed,” she says,
adding that high-profile cases, like the 1991 Kinko’s
copy-shop case, brought the issue to the forefront.
On the other side of the fence, Robert Ravas,
who clears permissions for Scott Foresman, also
attests to an increase in children’s lit use, specifically
in pre-K and elementary texts, a result of the “whole
language” movement. His editorial colleagues have even
been using literature to teach other disciplines — for
example, poetry included in a science program and The
Little House on the Prairie in a social studies text.
Scott Foresman has also started a custom publishing
division to produce textbooks for individual states.
Each use (textbooks, CD-rom, and online programs such
as their iText) requires its own clearance, thus representing
opportunities for additional income.
The New Copy Shop
The
Kinko’s case was just the beginning. This year alone,
a dozen publishers have been involved in cases against
copy shops catering to academics. An Austin, Texas-area
case was settled in March with the defendants agreeing
to pay damages to six publisher plaintiffs and, perhaps
more importantly, promising to go through the Copyright
Clearance Center (www.copyright.com). The CCC is probably
the largest online provider of copyright licensing and
is a testament to the recent boom in permissions requests.
The CCC manages the rights to over 1.75 million works
and represents more than 9,600 publishers, and these
numbers are escalating among educational and trade houses
alike. “The process used to be so cumbersome that even
though professors wanted to do the right thing, it was
very time consuming. Now it’s easier,” Oxford’s Smith
says, in praise of the CCC. “As textbooks get more expensive,
professors are leaning away from textbooks, and making
their own custom packets. It used to be a bunch of copies
stapled together, but now they are going to custom publishers
and packaging them very much like a regular book.”
Back at RH, Allen says it is important to get permissions
up and running on its RMS, because it hopes the CCC
will then automatically link with it, transferring all
reports electronically. New permissions income is expected
from such sources as ebrary, a licensor of content
databases, and possibly Google, and these “are
a big driver in why we want to automate our system with
theirs.” Might technology and outsourcing mean the end
of permissions departments? It’s unlikely, since publishing’s
very essence is complexity — a trait no plastic surgeon
can fix.
©2004
Publishing Trends
