Re: Copyright Clearance Center
Has anyone ever heard of the Copyright Clearance Center?
Yup <smile>.
I'm currently working for someone who's had several technical books
published, and he recently received a check for around $250 from this
organization. According to the enclosed material, this is royalties
for non-specific copying in Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, where
photocopy license fees are charged.
On the face of it, this looks like free money. Does anyone know if
there's any catch we might be missing?
No catch. Theoretically, the author is entitled to receive a royalty each
time his material is reproduced---not just the first time a book is sold,
but every time anyone photocopies more than a tiny fraction of it. In
practice, few authors see any of the money that is due them, because it's
such a pain to comply with those particular provisions of the copyright
law. (How often do -you- pay the author for copies of an article or a
cartoon that you pass along to friends? Or of a book that you copy a whole
chapter from?)
The Copyright Clearance Center is a very useful organization. If you've
ever ordered reprints of a journal article through UnCover, The Magazine
Index, or other online document delivery sources, or gotten photocopies of
an article through most interlibrary loan programs, part (sometimes all) of
the fee you were charged was probably a payment to the Copyright Clearance
Center.
The service they offer is especially useful for libraries that provide
patrons photocopies of articles from journals to which the library
subscribes. I used to get frustrated with that detailed form I had to fill
out whenever I ordered a copy of an article from JACS or JBC. Well, the
library keeps track of the total number of copies it makes from a
particular issue of a journal. At the end of the year (sometimes more
frequently) they send the details along to the CCC with a check for the
per-page fee. The CCC then, after taking their cut, parcels out the rest
as royalties to the copyright holders.
I've also used them when I needed 6 copies of a choral score that was still
under copyright but out of print, and the publisher had gone out of
business. I located a library that had a reference copy of the score, and
paid the CCC fee and regular photocopy charges. CCC took care of locating
the current copyright owner and passing on the appropriate royalty. It
ain't cheap from a consumer standpoint, but it protects you from legal
liability for reproducing copyrighted material and gets the authors a bit
of the money they are entitled to for the use of their intellectual
property.
My advice, FWIW, is to cash the check and write them a nice thank-you letter.
K -at- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- -dot- Kat Nagel, MasterWork Consulting Services
LIFE1 (technical writing/editing/web stuff) katnagel -at- eznet -dot- net
LIFE2 (vocal chamber music/performance junkie) PlaynSong -at- aol -dot- com
"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life:
Music & Cats." __________________Albert Einstein
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