Construction Industry Trends
November 2006
Making Sense of Copyrights
 |
| Issue Table of Contents |
|
|
John Pace is vice president of publications and marketing for ASTM International, one of the largest voluntary standards developing organizations (SDOs) in the world. He discusses what ASTM is doing to improve understanding of fair use and copyright agreements.
Q: Why is it important to ASTM to protect its copyrights and intellectual property?
ASTM is a little different from a lot of the other standards organizations because 80 percent of our income comes from the sale of publications. A lot of organizations rely on income from either membership or activities such as training or product certification, while ASTM relies simply on the sales of its publications and intellectual property to generate income to run the entire operation. If people are engaging in copyright violations, obviously it’s cutting the amount of revenue that we can realize. It’s one of the primary reasons that not only ASTM but other organizations are challenged with the pricing situation. If people pay the fair market value of intellectual property and we do not have to confront copyright violations, we wouldn’t necessarily have to take that into consideration when establishing the pricing.
Q: Have you had to raise prices?
I don’t know of an SDO out there who hasn’t raised its prices somewhat since moving into the electronic world.
Q: Has it become more of a problem as documents have become digital?
In the old days with paper, if you went to a Xerox machine and made copies, you were cognizant of the fact that you were doing something wrong. There was also a certain amount of work involved. In the digital world today, taking a PDF and making it an email attachment and sending it out to the world is fairly commonplace, and that includes standards. Anybody can put a standard up on a website to be shared. People don’t think it’s a big deal, but again, when they do that, they’re cutting revenue that should be directed toward the SDO.
Q: Who do you think is doing this?
I think it’s happening on all levels. My best guess is that probably 80 percent of the copyright and licensing violations we see are just the result of pure ignorance. In those cases, people don’t know that what they’re doing is illegal. It happens at all levels, from the mom-and-pop shops to the big corporations. I think there is some intentional breaking of the rules, intentional cutting of corners, but I think those violations are much smaller, probably 10 percent. Then there’s probably another 10 percent that think that it may be a violation, but don’t want to take the time to confirm that it’s a violation or be burdened with the cost of doing it right, so they do it anyway.
Q: Do you think part of the problem is that copyright laws can be difficult to understand?
There are different issues associated with patents, copyrights, and trademarks, plus different rules that apply to different types of intellectual property. Then you have different rules that an SDO, as copyright owner, determines on its own individual basis. If you’ve read the terms and conditions from five different SDOs, you would probably have five different interpretations or licensing policies. Even so, basically I think we all abide by the same principles under fair use. But even fair use interpretation of copyright law is still a vague concept in specifying exactly what you can do and what you are not allowed to do. It does make it very confusing for the end customer.
One of the things we’ve done at ASTM is that we’ve greatly simplified terms and conditions. We have one paragraph that specifically spells out what people can and cannot do when they download a standard. I think that has helped a great deal because it removes that shadow of doubt. They can download an ASTM document, they can make one print for their own personal use, they can leave the electronic copy on a computer, but beyond that, they can’t put it on a server. They can’t email it to colleagues. It makes it very black and white.
Q: How do you handle violations?
Basically, and in most instances, we have a combination of an educational notification and cease-and-desist policy. We’re probably more vigilant than anybody in terms of monitoring the web and following up on what we suspect to be violations. When we do find a violation, we send a letter to the organization explaining they are in violation of our terms and conditions, and tell them that they have five working days to address and correct the issue. And if they do cooperate, then in most cases, if it appears to be an innocent oversight, we look at it as no harm, no foul.
With this kind of approach, we find that people are willing to be open and cooperate. A majority of them say they really didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. They clean up their websites, removing our document, and agree that they won’t do it again. In some cases, it results in new licensing opportunities for us. It’s pretty good because we do follow up and we don’t see too many repeat offenders.
Q: Are there any risks to companies when they don’t use copyrights and intellectual property correctly?
Legally, organizations that are caught directly, blatantly, and knowingly violating copyrights are subject to heavy fines. There have been several major copyright cases over the last 10 to 15 years that have resulted in penalties to organizations in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. No SDO wants to get involved in suing people, because basically what you’re doing is suing your members or your customers. We’re all in the not-for-profit space and trying to provide a member service and put out a good product. We want people to use our standards, and we’re not in the business of trying to sue people to get money. But if it gets to a point where individuals or organizations are severely damaging a standards organization by engaging in that type of behavior, we don’t have a choice.
Another risk is using outdated information. You always want users to use the most current standard or code. That’s one of the benefits of a subscription arrangement. At ASTM, about 30 percent of our documents is either new or revised every year, so basically within a three-year period we can have close to 100 percent turnover of all of our documents. So there could be a little bit of a risk factor if people are using illegally posted ASTM documents on the Internet that could in fact be out-of-date information.
If you’re using outdated information, which could represent outdated technology, you’re just going to hurt your product or your service. It’s not going to make you a market leader.
Subscribe to eNewsletter