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.
