BISG Rights Summit
Summary and Next Steps

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) is a national not for profit trade association that seeks to facilitate innovation and shared solutions among all publishing industry stakeholders. This is done through a variety of efforts, including publishing actionable industry research;offering professional development and educational workshops; and most notably, creating, maintaining, and supporting industry standards and best practices.

From the standardization of metadata, to support for standardized identifiers and classification schemes like BISAC and Thema, to support and education around emerging standards for digital content like EPUB 3, BISG acts as the US arm for the administration of a variety of global standards. This work is done through a series of volunteer committees and working groups, each composed of domain experts from all sectors of the industry, working in concert to solve problems and remove friction from the value chain. One such group is BISG’s Rights Committee.

The Rights Committee, co-chaired by Emily Williams (Barnes & Noble) and David Marlin (MetaComet Systems, LLC), had since 2010 been engaged in two separate projects: the creation of a Rights Controlled Vocabulary (a structured index of rights terms), and the creation of a transactional spec to accompany payments between rights trading partners (an approximation of a payment advice or royalty statement).Without clear support for these projects among the membership,the BISG office and the Rights Committee leadershipthought it necessary to validate the overall direction and approach being taken by the committee, and in late 2013, decided to put the committeeon hiatus so that additional stakeholders might be engaged to provide feedback and advice.

That in mind, on June 11, 2014, BISG convened a “Rights Summit,” with the stated purpose of “bringing together stakeholders in the publishing rights community to discuss the points of friction affecting the industry in the management of rights and rights data, in order to help BISG set priorities for our Rights Committee going forward.”

BISG invited specific stakeholders known to be active in the purchase, sale, and management of rights, and also issued an open invitation to the entire BISG membership to attend. To moderate the discussion, BISG engaged Michael Healy (Executive Director, International Relations, Copyright Clearance Center) and Heather Reid (Chairperson, Board of Directors at National Information Standards Organization and Senior Director, Data Services & Standards, Copyright Clearance Center), both widely acknowledged experts in the fields of rights and copyright.

In advance of the meeting, BISG surveyed both confirmed attendees and the industry at large as to the current state of rights transactions and rights systems. The surveyssought to identify areas of friction that existed in the purchase, sale, and management of publication rights throughout various sectors of the industry. Results from these initial surveyswere varied, but provided consistent feedback that the current systems in place for the management and sale of rights caused both company- and systematic, industry-wide friction, and validated the need for a meeting to discuss how BISG might best address these issues.

The meeting, generously sponsored by Klopotek, drew twenty five participants from twenty companies. (See the appendix for a list of participants.) After brief presentations from BISG Executive Director Len Vlahos, moderator Michael Healy, and George Logan of Klopotek, the participants engaged in a vibrant and thorough three-hour discussion on the current state of the US publishing rights industry.

Three main themes emerged throughout the course of the conversation.

  1. ROI and the Value of Standardization. It was noted that the implementation of standards and systems requires resources, both human and financial. Given that publishers were not willing or able to provide such support for the prior efforts, it was agreed that a financial justification was needed to support future efforts.

With new kinds of digital content bringing a wealth of new licensing opportunities to publishers and content creators, those in attendance agreed that the value of a set of standards for finding, tracking, and purchasing/selling rights is greater now than ever. In order to convince decision-makers to appropriate such resources, participants agreed that a cost-benefit analysis must be done first. What kind of ROI can a publishing company or agency expect from investing in systems or in implementing standardized solutions?

To address these questions, participants suggested that before standards were refined or promoted, the first order of business for BISG should be to conduct research on 1) the size and scope of the rights business for companies in the United States; and 2) the potential return-on-investment for an individual company implementing such solutions, the latter done perhaps through case studies of companies already implementing such solutions.

  1. Communication and standards. There was strong consensus that those who buy, sell, and manage rights need simpler, more consistent, and more efficient means of communicating transaction details. From information about payments to reports on the sale of licensed content, agreed upon standards will, the assembled believed, remove ambiguity and improve efficiency among all trading partners, making it easier for everyone with a stake in the rights transaction to account for their transactions and get paid.

A number of participants drew comparisons between the evolution and organization of ONIX, the industry accepted standard for transmission of book product metadata between trading partners, and that which may be needed for the management of rights data.

Many reported having encountered difficulties transacting rights because of a misalignment of terms and terminology, and specifically validated prior work done by the BISG Rights Committee.In particular, the group confirmed the both the need for a rights vocabulary and the value of expanding and updating the existing vocabularyto include terminology relevant to new and emerging licensing opportunities.

  1. Data and Discovery. Participants agreed that there was an additional issue having to do with the visibility and discoverability of rights. This breaks down to three distinct but overlapping areas of ambiguity: 1) both within the industry and within individual companies, a lack of knowledge as to which rights are owned versus available to be licensed; 2) a need to better identify and understand opportunities that exist for licensing content beyond traditional book deals; and 3)creating a standardized way of handling small scale rights deals that would reduce the labor cost and make dealing with unfamiliar partners less risky and more profitable. There was a general consensus that in addition to standardized systems for defining, tracking and communicating rights information as discussed above, potential solutions might include a feed of standardized rights data from rights sellers, and perhaps eventually a centralized data repository or “hub” where buyers and sellers of rights might be able to easily identify who owns rights to a particular piece of content, what rights are available and how to go about purchasing them.

Based on this discussion, the next steps identified by the attendees and validated by the BISG office were to:

  1. Publish this white paper and disseminate it to participants of the Rights Summit, members of the Rights Committee, and other interested parties throughout the industry.
  1. Convene a meeting of the full BISG Rights Committee, inviting participants from the Rights Summit to attend, and create a plan for addressing the issues outlined above. This meeting is currently being scheduled for October.

BISG is grateful to Michael and Heather for creating and moderating the program, to Klopotek for sponsoring, Kaplan Publishing for hosting, to Emily and David for their work as co-chairs of the Rights Committee, and most of all, to the Summit participants for their active engagement.

APPENDIX A – RIGHTS SUMMIT PARTICIPANTS

Emily Williams,Barnes & Noble

Jeff Gerecke, Bates system

Michael Healy, Copyright Clearance Center

Matt Pedersen, Copyright Clearance Center

Heather Reid, Copyright Clearance Center

Ginger Clark, Curtis Brown LTD

Phil Madans, Hachette Book Group

Nancy Weise, Hachette Book Group

Rob Weisstuch, HarperCollins Publishers

Tara Hart, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency Inc. (JVNLA)

Kris Kliemann,John Wiley & Sons

Maureen McMahon, Kaplan Publishing

George Logan, Klopotek

Steve Waldron, Klopotek

David Marlin, MetaComet Systems, LLC

Yulia Borodyanskaya, McGraw-Hill

Elaine Ferreira, Pearson

Jeffery Corrick, Penguin Random House

Terri Henry, Penguin Random House

Melissa Malone, Perseus Books Group

Lew Bader, Pivotal Associates LLC

George W. Slowik, Jr., Publishers Weekly

Henry Illing, Simon & Schuster

John Wicker, Tata Consulting

Yashih Wu, Watson Ecosystem (IBM)