US: a report by
Daniel J. Schaible, SVP Content, BurrellesLuce
There is an increasing level of activity surrounding the whole topic of copyright in the US as content providers seek new sources of revenue. The North American media monitoring and evaluation industry segment has no single source for obtaining rights for content use. Compounding this is the number of sources, which may speak to why there isn't a single licensing body to represent them. The Audit Bureau of Circulation alone currently reports on 2,752 publications in the
These circumstances have been the genesis of our content department at BurrellesLuce. The effort invested early on starting when wire services began transitioning from teletype to terminals has laid the groundwork for our current efforts in maintaining a “best effort” compliance program. We currently have a staff of 8 employees. The priority for the team is set based on the prior year's list of content sources ranked by yield. Sources are engaged and licensing is negotiated and executed. Technical contacts are made and content feeds are arranged. A data warehouse is maintained by the content staff to support the reconciliation of content use and royalty payment. Burrelles invoices its customers for royalty charges on a separate line item on their invoices. So to support our hundreds of licensing agreements covering thousands of sources, BurrellesLuce must maintain a separate AR/AP process to ensure fulfillment of royalty agreements. This effort is to some extent or another duplicated by each monitoring/evaluation company; an effort not required when a central licensor, á la the NLA model, handles royalty fulfillment.
