With the Frankfurt Book Fair opening in a week, Mitja Linss of RightsDirect, the European subsidiary of Copyright Clearance Center, turns his attention to the host country, Germany. To discuss that nation’s latest legal developments and new business models based on copyright licensing, Linss spoke recently with Christian Sprang, the head of legal affairs at the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, or Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, an organization that represents more than 5,500 German publishing houses and bookstores.
The collaboration between CCC and VG WORT, the German collecting society for text works, “really seems to give the answers we need for companies that want to respect copyright, and want to have compliance for every worker who uses articles from journals or from books,” said Sprang.
“The other interesting and promising project we see here is a collaboration between a Boersenverein subsidiary company, MVB, and CCC for one-stop-shop licensing for small licenses,” he added. “We have already more than 250,000 books where with a single mouse click, you can license whatever you want immediately. It’s something that has not been possible for ages, and which to me seems really to be a huge step forward.”
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