Copyrighted Content Usage Trends Report – Digital CxO Podcast EP121

Hello, and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today I have Lauren Ope. She is the Vice President and Managing Director of Copyright Clearance Center.

How are you doing? I'm good, thanks. How are you?

Good. So can you share a little bit about Copyright Clearance Center and, uh, what services do you provide? Sure.

Um, so copyright, uh, clearance Center. We've been around, um, more than 40 years now. Um, in fact, originally we were, um, created, uh, to deal with the very new technology of the photocopier.

And imagine, as you can imagine, we've evolved quite a bit since then. But fundamentally, what CCC does is we sit in between the, um, creators and the copyright holders of, of creators of text content, uh, the copyright holders and the content users who use content. So if you think about, um, when you read a book or a newspaper article or a journal article, that is a primary use, but you may wanna do something else with that content.

You may wanna share it with colleagues, um, whether, uh, paper copy, old fashioned paper copies, but more modern in more modern terms. You might be using SharePoint to share that material. Um, uh, sending emails, those types of things.

And those are secondary uses that require permission from the copyright holder. And what CCC does is we provide licensing solutions that allow corporations to allow the seamless, um, sharing of content like that so that individual permissions don't need to be purchased, but rather we have licensing solutions that make it really seamless for corporations while still remunerating the rights holders for additional uses of their content, um, that, that, um, you know, uh, should be recognized. So thanks for sharing that with us.

You recently came out with a report, the copyrighted content usage trends report. Can you share a little bit about what was that report focusing on and who did you survey? Sure.

So we've been doing this report, um, every couple of years for, um, the last 15 or so years. Um, and, uh, what we typically take a look at is the sharing and usage of content within corporations across a really wide range of industries. Um, and take a look at kind of the practices among the employees, um, in terms of what types of materials they share, how often who they share them with, and what technology they're using, uh, to share those materials.

Um, so historically we've focused on things like the increase in the use of collaboration tools like Slack and SharePoint and teams and things like that. Um, but this year for the first time, we also took a look at how, um, employees were using copyrighted content with AI solutions. Um, so that was a new thing, uh, for us this year, was to take a look at how, um, how employees are starting to use AI tools.

So we asked questions about their, how often they're using AI tools in their day-to-day work, um, and, uh, what types of activities they're, um, they're doing when they're, um, using those AI tools. Um, and so some of the findings that were really interesting were, we, we did slice and dice by industry, but when you look at all industries as a whole, roughly three quarters of employees who are what we call the knowledge worker. So somebody who would be using, um, you know, uh, published materials in their day-to-day job, um, more than three quarters when you combine all the industries are using AI either sometimes or more often than sometimes either often or regularly.

Um, and only one quarter are saying either rarely or never. So that was, um, fairly consistent actually with other published studies, um, but certainly, um, shows the very fast uptake of ai, uh, within corporations, really across sectors. What does this mean for companies and business leaders knowing that most, most are using ai?

Are they using, uh, AI tools that are company provided or are they using, um, their own tools or a mix of both? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so we didn't specifically ask about approved tools in our, um, in our study, but, um, that's something that we talk with a lot of customers about.

And, um, one of the things we've been starting to hear a lot about is, um, is sort of shadow what I, what you, you'll hear people sometimes call shadow ai, which is when an organization doesn't necessarily have approved tools or a way for organizations to, or employees at organizations to request to use a tool than what you sometimes find is that people are using tools anyway on their own, uh, et cetera, which obviously can pose a risk for the organization in a number of different ways. CCC tends to focus on concerns around the use of intellectual property, but there are also things like, um, privacy, security concerns that come with, you know, potentially putting proprietary, uh, information into like an open tool as opposed to something where it's more of a walled garden. And that's, you know, the environment is only for the corporation.

So as it relates to copyright infringement in this age of ai, what advice do you have for business leaders? Yeah, I think, I think there's a couple of, um, of important, uh, things to keep in mind. Um, so the first is, um, looking at your, um, co copyright compliance policy overall and starting to incorporate the use of AI into that policy.

And then of course, um, updating your training and, and training, uh, uh, employees regularly about how copyright is, is involved, how what you know, what is and isn't allowed. Um, and then, um, uh, making employees aware of what tools are approved or what the process is for, um, being allowed to use the tools. Because I think what we are finding what we hear is that, um, when there is an approved tool or a path to make sure things that, that you're doing things in accordance with the company policy, et cetera, then that usually is leveraged and people are excited about it.

But where there is just a flat no or silence, that's when, um, you often have, you know, employees kind of doing their own thing, um, which obviously can put, um, companies at risk. And then, um, when you think about all the various, uh, activities that, uh, employees may be involved in, there's kind of two major categories of where you might you wanna in particular be thinking about copyright compliance. So the first is, um, choosing a tool, um, and considering how, um, that tool might have been trained.

Um, and in the general, uh, category of training, we find that a lot of the companies that we talk to might license a tool but then need to do additional fine tuning and training for, to make it really fit for purpose for whatever their particular task, uh, they have in mind in is. And often that involves using kind of expert content or copyright copyrighted content to do that. So that, um, involves the making of copies, it involves, um, using someone's content, uh, for another purpose.

Um, so typically licensing would be involved and that could be direct licensing or it could be, um, collective licensing like through CCC. Um, but the important thing is that generally permission is required. And then the second kind of major category is, um, that individuals, which is kind of what our study covered, um, may be using tools and incor incorporating copyrighted content into their use of those tools.

So one of the ones that we hear most commonly across a wide range of industries is summarization, right? There's so much good content out there and everyone has limited time. So summarization tools are starting to be used a lot to help people get a big picture of things, decide what the right things that they want to do, a deeper dive in is, et cetera.

Um, and so often copyrighted content is being inputted into those tools. And essentially what's happening there is a copy is being made, a secondary use is happening. Um, and that also, you know, requires route permission.

So that's, those are kind of the two big categories of kind of usage that people should be aware of. And then building into their copyright compliance policies and looking at their licenses to make sure they're kind of properly covering those types of employee uses. I imagine that can be very challenging and difficult to track.

Yes. Uh, and that's one of the things that, um, uh, collective licensing can be very, um, helpful with in that, um, it's, it's not super practical to, uh, have an employee be requesting a permission every time they want to say make a summary. Um, and that's where an annual solution can come into play, where you getting a consistent set of rights across a wide range of publishers that allow for certain specific uses.

And, and one of the things that CCCs licenses focus on is internal uses. So it's really about facilitating that collaboration within the confines of the organization to kind of help them be more efficient, improve their research and development, not to be publishing things for external use, but really to just improve the efficiency of the organization. Um, and having something that brings all of those permissions across a wide range of publishers together in a single license can be a very efficient way for organizations to operate.

So of course, AI was the big topic of focus for, um, this report, but you said that you've always covered a lot of other technologies and other aspects as well. Were there any other key stats? Is there any other technology, um, that, that had any interesting statistics?

Um, I think the biggest one was that this was the first time, um, that email was not the per was no longer the preferred choice. I think I have that right. Um, for, so for a long time we've asked about how people share materials and then, um, we always give them the, the opportunity to answer all the different ways that they, they share material and then we ask like, which is the most common?

Um, and for a long time it was always email, email, email, and everything else was secondary. And this year, although it had been kind of a trend to, um, to see things like, um, uh, share drives and things like that this year for the first time, the collaboration tools like Team SharePoint, things like that really, um, stood out as being actually a preferred method as opposed to just one of many. So that was sort of interesting.

Alright. Well if there was one key takeaway you could share with our audience today, what would that be? I think the key takeaway for me is that, um, the, um, AI use is going to, well, what I guess it's that the adoption is, has been faster I think than any other, um, technology that I've seen and certainly in my lifetime.

Um, we compare that a little bit to the experience that CCC had when we evolved from, uh, offering something that was really a print license originally and then adding digital uses. And the adoption of that was fast at the time, but nothing compared to, um, the AI adoption. Um, when we go to, when I think about asking about collaboration tools and things like that, that went from 10%, used them to 20 to, I don't remember the exact numbers.

And for ai, we were immediately up to 75%, uh, using, um, co copyrighted content with and for a real, a wide range of, of tasks, um, summarization, translation, uh, ha having research assistants, um, automation, uh, automated reviews. So I think it's the adoption and so then it's okay, the adoption is happening. There's you, there's, you're not putting that genie back in the bottle.

So what do you need to do in terms of your copyright compliance policies, your licensing strategy to make sure that you are supporting your employees as they leverage this new technology to become more efficient, to research faster? That kind of thing. It really is amazing how quickly everyone wanted to use AI Really, and it was quite stunning.

One of the things that we saw is when we first started talking to our, our clients both on the, uh, rights holder publisher side and on the consumer side, um, initially we, we met with folks kind of right away in that post chat GBT launch period. Um, and initially people were excited and wanting to have the conversations, but the policies were, don't use it, uh, especially with big corporations. And less than a year later it was, I have to figure out how to use it because I have directives from above and we must, we must embrace this, we must do this.

Um, and so that's seeing that, uh, skyrocket has been really fascinating. Yeah, Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today.

Thank you for having me. And thank you to our audience. Stay tuned.

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