PLS urges publishers to opt-in to Collective Digital Licensing

PLS logo With the growing use and supply of material published in an electronic format, the Publishing  Licensing Society (PLS) has been working with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), publishers and the trade associations on a series of new licences. These allow licensees to re-use born-digital material to the usual CLA licence extent limits and for a very limited use – a convenience that licensees find with the CLA licences, which allows PLS to distribute copy royalties to publishers with minimal effort on the publishers part. 

 
We need all publishers’ opt-ins for continuity of each licence: there is value to the licence if licensees know all publishers are included, and hence they do not need to double-check before copying from anything that they already own, or subscribe to.
 
The main benefits to opting into the licence are: 
  • Publishers will no longer have to deal with the low-level permissions requests taking away the administration burden
  • The collective licensing system offers a cost-effective and efficient means of paying copy royalties to publishers for this re-use.
  • A digital copying licence can only reinforce the copyright message in a digital world and where such a message is needed

PLS will be contacting you soon to find out your chosen level of participation with this licence. PLS recognises that digital is different, therefore the collective licensing of digital material will operate on an opt-in basis. This ensures publishers can maintain control over those ISBN and ISSN identified titles they wish to include in a digital licence repertoire.

 In the meantime if you wish to discuss or have any questions concerning any aspect of these developments, please contact David Bishop at the PLS offices, tel: 020 7299 7730

Visit www.pls.org.uk for more details