Conference 7.286::digital

    I think that this is how the Digital Libraries can provide you and me
    with copies of articles.

    The CCC is a "not for profit" company set up by the publishing
    industries to collect fees for the copying of copyrighted materials.
    Since people do this all the time anyway, they are simply trying to
    recoup some of the revenue lost by people not buying the material. For
    instance, if your having a meeting and make ten copies of your hand out
    and put in a cartoon from a copyrighted magazine without pemission then
    the CCC could sue your company on behalf of the publisher. Usually a
    settlement would occur and that settlement would include the purchase
    of a license from the CCC giving limited permission to use copyrighted
    mat;l.

The CCC is a DEC customer, a college pal works there in computer operations.
They love the NVAX systems!  
Matt

Check out some technical journals or proceedings you may see the CCC
mentioned.  

For example, I have the IEEE CASE 92 proceedings.  There's an explanation of
copying procedures opposite the table of contents.  It says that libraries are
allowed to copy over and above the fair-use limits of US copyright law,
provided they pay the per-article fee to the CCC.  Each article in the
proceedings has a copyright notice and associated fee at the bottom of
the first page of the
article.

I speculate that by paying a flat rate to the CCC, Digital has the
unlimited right to copy such articles for internal use only (but not to
resell or distribute outside the company).  I emphasize that this is
purely speculation on my part, it's likely to be wrong in significant
details, but I'm hoping is somewhere in the same ballpark as the truth.

   Gary

    CCC might be similar to another copyright overseer that I am familiar
    with.  For our church, we use 35mm slides to display the words of hymns
    and choruses for the congregation.  Obviously, most hymns and choruses
    are copyrighted.  We pay an annual fee to an organization, CCLI (I
    forget what it stands for), that allows us to do this.  All we have to
    do is report to CCLI the names and publishers of the hymns and choruses
    we create as 35mm slides.  We only have to report for the time we
    create the slide.  They take care of providing a `copy fee' to the
    publisher.  We can also make photocopies; these have to be reported
    each time because they are not considered `reusable' as are the 35mm
    slides.
    
    Maybe CCC operates similarly.
    
    tgc

ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and other acronyms you might see on phonograph
records supply the same kind of services to songwriters and publishers.

ASCAP (and maybe the others) actually employs people who go
around to places with music playing in the background, even a radio,
and inform them they owe money to the publishers and writers of
the music they've been using in their business.

    sorry to go off on a tangent here...
    
    re -1  I believe the Supreme Court just ruled that commercial radios
    playing in places of business dont constitute a need for a royalty
    to be paid anymore.

    
    the supreme court ruling said that the commercial store did not have
    to pay royalties to the musician. the radio still has to pay
    musicians. 

Perhaps this is a new ruling.  The one I recall, from several years
ago, was that merely playing a single radio loudly in a store was not a 
rebroadcast and didn't require royalties, but that piping it through
more than one speaker was a rebroadcast, and did require royalties.

It gets complicated, and there've been numerous recent changes, which
is why we pay lawyers to worry about such things.

  Gary