Frustrations and Fixes
Why should I care about Rights Management?
Imagine someone diligently working on new content for your organization. They come across a great piece of media... with no information about its usage rights. They ask:
- Can I use the content?
- Do we have releases or rights to the content?
- Is the content meant for external use or internal use only?
Thus, that content creator is mired in confusion instead of directing that time and energy toward creating cool stuff.
Digitized content in a DAM will have many rights and usage restrictions, and if these aren’t clear to DAM software end-users, the whole system will get bogged down. Or worse, entire projects could be rejected or scratched after significant time and effort have been invested, just because the rights and restrictions weren’t clear from the outset. Or maybe even worse… you might get hit with a fine, if an image or footage isn’t properly cleared.
Okay, so what should I do?
The Fix
To avoid the above worse-and-even-worse-case scenarios…
- Establish a template for displaying rights/clearance information in such a way (with the right metadata fields) that your content creators can easily and quickly determine if they can use a given asset, and in what channels/vehicles.
- Include release and license forms in your DAM, to make it easy for your end-users to use the correct form, if it’s necessary to start from scratch when clearing digital assets.
- Include (and make readily accessible) information that tracks the history of how an asset has been used, to avoid wasting money by clearing the same content a second or third time when the first time would have covered what you intend to do. Useful types of metadata can help make your DAM system a true single source of truth.
