Rights Vocabulary: the publisher situation

While I was already thinking about Rights vocabulary, the Copyright Clearance Center conveniently tweeted a link to this post about the massive scale of rights and royalties that publishers must deal with, and ways they are considering to automate or at least improve the process. Rights and royalty data, it turns out, are a bit of a Wild West situation, with practically no standardization, and publishers "still receiving royalty statements from their licensees in all imaginable formats — PDFs, Excel documents, and even paper printouts."

Although the issue of ultimately funding the initiative is still up in the air, the Book Industry Study Group's (BISG) Rights Committee has begun work associated with three major themes:  the value of standardization and how it will provide return on investment, development of a standard vocabulary of rights terminology, and ways to improve the visibility and discoverability of rights. 

As the publishing industry continues to consolidate, with the resulting need to combine massively varied licensing data and control ever larger numbers of assets, the need to automate this process and create interoperability will become increasingly pressing.  While publishers have been getting along without standardization and automation thus far, it seems likely that the industry as a whole will become convinced that enough return can be made on the investment, and will move forward on this issue.