How can Content and Asset Management systems solve the problematic issue of providing clarity on rights and copyright clearance for television archives?

Contribution to a discussion at the Rights Workshop, FIAT/IFTA Vienna World Conference

by Catherine Lacken,
SWR Stuttgart, ARD, Germany, August 2000

Content and Asset Management systems will be a feature of broadcast archives in the future. If they are to live up to all the expectations placed in them, one requirement they must fulfill is to unite descriptive information on footage with the relevant information on rights or copyright.

Transparency regarding rights must be provided at the point where potential users access the database; this is when the initial decision about the suitability of footage is made.

Often in-house producers are motivated by the notion that re-use of archive footage is a cheap way of filling air time. When the possibility of rights and copyright clearance is raised, the producer often decides against using the footage. This is especially true for news or current affairs where the archive is contacted maybe only hours before going on air. Potentially suitable footage is therefore rejected due to lack of clarity on rights. Experience has shown that settling the rights issue after broadcast can be a very costly option.

When restrictions apply, it must be clear to what these refer: to the whole production, to certain sections, shots or maybe just to one particular frame (e.g. photograph). The type of restriction must also be indidated (use not permitted, permission must be sought before use and thereafter use is free or subject to certain conditions; use is permitted but costs money; if it costs money, some indication of how much must be given because the producer needs to know whether these costs can be covered by the production's budget; if copyright clearance is necessary, it should be indicated whether this is a simple straightforward procedure or if it is a complicated matter.

This transparancy on rights and costs will become more important when it is commonplace for broadcasters to disseminate and market their assets via the internet; this new group of potential customers interested will not tolerate a situation where they have to wait days or weeks to find out if and under what conditions they may have the footage they are seeking.

The task on hand
The problem in bringing all the relevant information together is that this data is collected and managed by two different departments: the archives and the legal department.

Archive databases include metadata such as title, date of transmission, length, format, author etc. plus descriptive data on content (category, key words, thematic information, image description etc.) that is generated during cataloging. If information on the source of footage is available, the cataloger links this information to the footage to which it applies. Sometimes the cataloger will suspect that there may be rights on footage (historical b/w material is an obvious example); and then draws attention to the fact that rights may have to be cleared before re-use.

All data pertaining to contracts, copyright and royalties is collected and managed by the legal department. Much of it is of a confidential nature, which explains why legal departments are reluctant to allow access to their systems. Up until now these were designed as rights management systems and not to meet the requirements of asset management systems.

Normal procedure at the moment is that whenever footage is requested by customers from outside the organisation, the query must be cleared by the legal department. Only where the archive knows that there are restrictions on use are in-house producers referred to it.

When on-line services are the gateway to acquiring material produced by broadcasters, the situation concerning copyright stipulations and royalty costs must be clear to the potential customer, as this influences the purchase decision.

Designing asset management systems means investigating if interfaces between legacy television archive databases and rights management systems are the way forward or if a restructuring of existing operations or databases is called for.