Copyright Clearance Center at 40

摘要

As Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) prepares to celebrate its 40th anniversary, it continues to create new products while enriching earlier ones-all of which provides key benefits to both its participating publishers and users. Founded in 1978 based on a recommendation by Congress, CCC's original platform was primarily manual. Subscribing customers, mostly libraries, reported (annually, monthly, or more frequently) the number of photocopies of identified books and articles they had made and that required permissions. Based on these reports, CCC staffers would calculate permissions fees (from prices set by individual copyright holders) and bill the customers. The customers would then make payments to CCC, which were remitted to the appropriate rightsholders (minus CCC's service fee). CCC's current offerings have come a long way from this initial, labor-intensive effort, and it has become one of the most agile and innovative providers of publisher and user solutions for reuse and discovery options in the digital age.