Many companies have licenses from a collective management organization for rights to use and share content within their organizations. Licensing expert Stephen Garfield explains how a collective license works.
Video Transcript
So, let’s say you’re a researcher in a pharmaceutical company and you’re working on a new diabetes drug. Well, obviously in the course of your research you’re working with content that has been created by others. You need that content to understand what the drug is, what it does, where you’re going with it, as well as to understand what research has been done and what the implications of that research are.
That information can come from a lot of different sources: it can come from scientific journals, it can come from books, it can come from online databases. And what you need is a reuse right. You need permission to be able to use that content in a way that really works for you and the company that you work for. You may need to do something as simple as make a photocopy of the article. You may need to email the article out to some of your colleagues so they have access to it. You may need to be able to store that content to refer back to it on a future date.
The collective management organization steps in and actually provides you with the rights to be able to reuse the content from many different sources, providing the rights that are needed to allow you to do your job on a daily basis. Now many of you may actually have a collective management organization license today without even realizing it. But what that does is guarantees that you are using content with permission and don’t have to worry about copyright infringement.