Copyright Clearance Center
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) is a not-for-profit U.S. company based in Danvers, Massachusetts, that provides collective copyright licensing services for corporate and academic users of copyrighted materials. CCC procures agreements with rightsholders, primarily text publishers and authors, both for print and online, and acts as agent for them. This "collective agent" status allows CCC to represent thousands of publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors and other creators.
Collective licensing, as distinct from statutory licensing, is a means through which a user (licensee) can pay one annual fee for the use of all the covered materials of CCC’s publishers and authors. This arrangement provides one-stop shopping for the user, and obviates the need for users to track down many rights holders, many times, for many uses of copyrighted content.
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[edit] Background
A central location for clearing permissions (for the re-use of copyrighted works) was envisioned during the process leading to enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, and CCC was created not long after as an instantiation of this idea. Established as a not-for-profit organization by a group of authors, publishers and users, and with representatives on its Board of Directors not only from author and publisher groups but from user communities (such as libraries, major corporations, and document suppliers) as well, Copyright Clearance Center has been engaged in the licensing of copyrighted works, primarily text, for over twenty-five years.
[edit] Operations
The voluntary licenses available from Copyright Clearance Center are of two kinds: repertory (or, annual) and transactional. The license systems are offered through various services, for instance, to corporations (the Annual Copyright License) or to academic institutions (the Academic Permissions Service, among others). Through these, and multiple other mechanisms, CCC collects fees which represent royalty payments and then periodically distributes these monies to participating rightsholders. CCC meets its operating expenses through allocating a fraction of these fees. CCC also conducts extensive 'copyright education' programs, as well as sporadically coordinating legal actions, concerning copyright infringement, on behalf of participating rightsholders.
[edit] Relationships
Copyright Clearance Center participates in many industry organizations, among them: the Authors’ Coalition, the Copyright Society of the United States, the American Library Association, the Special Libraries Association, the International DOI Foundation (IDF), NFAIS, and NISO.
CCC is a member of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO) and has bilateral agreements with other reproduction rights organizations in 13 countries worldwide, under which it repatriates fees for overseas use of U.S. works.
