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 rightsholders, many times, for many uses of copyrighted content.
CCC is a global rights broker for the world’s most sought after materials, including millions of in- and out-of-print books, journals, newspapers, magazines, images, blogs and e-books. Founded in 1978 as a not-for-profit organization by authors publishers and content users in response to a suggestion of Congress preceding the Copyright Act of 1976, CCC provides smart solutions that simplify the licensing of content that lets businesses and academic institutions quickly get permission to use copyright-protected materials, while compensating publishers and content creators for the use of their works.
Amsterdam-based RightsDirect, the wholly owned European subsidiary of Copyright Clearance Center established in 2010, provides copyright compliance solutions for European-based companies to re-use and share the most relevant print and digital content in books, journals, newspapers, magazines and images.
- CCC is a not-for-profit organization organized in the State of New York with an independent board of directors.
- CCC provides licensing services to over 400 of the Fortune 500 companies.
- 35,000 corporations with employees in 180 countries are covered by CCC’s Annual Copyright License.
- CCC manages over 400 million rights to works in all formats.
- More than 1,100 academic institutions in the U.S. rely on CCC’s Annual Copyright License and Pay-Per-Use services to share information with confidence.
- In the past 10 years CCC has distributed more than $1 billion in royalties to rightsholders it represents.
- For the 4th straight year, CCC was named to EContent Magazine’s list of 100 companies that “matter most in the content industry.”
- CCC is a founding member of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO).