“I am in Washington, DC for the public launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), filling my time between workgroup sessions meeting with lawyers engaged in these issues. Oddly, that’s a lot of fun, because the future landscape of copyright and access will in some part be shaped by their thoughts and actions, and these are interesting times for all of us. And, if it weren’t for such meetings, I would not have known about an otherwise obscure report containing an interesting analysis of copyright licensing that could bear on libraries and publishing.
“One of the things being bandied about at the DPLA launch (which I will cover in more detail in future posts) is the concept of collective licensing. Collective licenses would permit a group of rightsholders to negotiate uniform licenses for specific types of access to a broad class of works for target audiences, usually for-fee, but not always. For example, libraries might appreciate a collective license that would say ‘all possibly in-copyright books which do not have identified rightsholders are open access from cultural institutions unless and until a rightsholder claims the work.’”
From Peter Brantley’s post on PWxyz, Dividing Collective Licenses