Art buyers, photo editors, publishers, advertisers, museums, or any other content acquirer has the unfortunate task of performing rights clearance or at least due diligence on any project they manage.  RightsPro.com can help throughout the entire process of taking a project from idea to production, from license negotiation to payment, and relicensing later on.

You’ll never again have to be uncertain about what you have, where it is, or who controls the rights. RightsPro is designed to support the research and licensing process and to document the work after the fact. It enables users to identify the rights holders for each content item, and license all uses, whether it is a digital image, a valuable collectible, a quotation, or a film clip.

Let’s take a look at some of the stages of a typical licensing workflow and how RightsPro can help.

Project Inception

When a new project comes along, everyone on the team is going to need some basic information. Don’t let your staff waste valuable time looking for answers to common questions.

RightsPro keeps contact and correspondence information organized and accessible by everyone in your group.  You can record detailed publishing specifications and the licensing budget of the project and relate staff, client, and vendor contact records.

License Negotiation

Publishers and designers lose thousands of dollars each year by not negotiating licenses with content vendors up front, not negotiating for future relicensing of content, not being able to use content under an existing license, and not negotiating bulk discounts.

RightsPro makes it easy to include these terms in your original contract negotiations, which later will automatically calculate the appropriate discounted licensing fee.

License negotiation is made easy by our process of detailed rate and discounts entry and automated letter generation to solidify your negotiations.

You can include your own special terms, or customize your solution to generate letters to your exact specifications.

RightsPro even lets you record costs such as a source’s reproduction fee so you’ll know exactly how much a scan or screener should cost before you ask for it.

Project Design

How many times has there been miscommunication among staff about which image was meant to appear in a certain spot? How many times has a designer picked the content for the cover only to find that it was the most expensive piece they could have chosen?

RightsPro has the flexiblity to allow several levels of edits throughout the project workflow. You can even estimate the licensing cost of a layout before going to production.

Visual editors will love being able to communicate the exact image they’re talking about with thumbnail representations.

Selects can be made within a project’s lightbox, allowing designers access to record the use of those items within the project.  Project managers can see the licensing cost of a draft page, section, or the entire project before they’ve committed.

Report Uses/Payment

You’ve finalized your project and you know what content you’re going to use and where you’re going to use it. Now it’s time to pay those vendors, and you need to make sure you don’t miss any uses and that you get every last discount you negotiated.

But who wants to deal with mutli-use, bulk, relicensing, and other discounts? You could get out your calculator for a few hours and hope you’ve had enough coffee to catch every possibility, or you could let RightsPro do the work for you.

The automatically generated purchase orders reference your original contract and again show your project details so there’s no question about the context of your usage reporting. The current fees and any past payments to this source, which may now be partially credited back due to discounts, are also shown.

A report of the content used accompanies the purchase order. Every detail of the content — including source IDs, credit lines, how and where it was used within the project, when it was received, and of course, the individual licensing fees and discounts — are displayed next to a thumbnail of the content so there’s no confusion about what you’re reporting to the source.

Production/Project Completion

You’re ready to start actual production of the project but you need to confirm what uses have been paid for, how much you’ve spent, and generate things like credit line reports.

In RightPro your first look at a project record always shows you a summary for each source and the licensing or payment status for each piece of content being used.

You’ll also be emailed before licenses expire so you can take down content or relicense without violating your agreement.

Relicensing

Have you ever thought you were done with a project only to find out it also needs to be re-run in another language, or that no one mentioned the brochure or the website that needed some of the same content as the original project?

Without a detailed licensing system, tracking down every last piece of content for relicensing can be a daunting task. It only gets worse as time goes by. After a few years it may be impossible to find all the information you need.

RightsPro gives you effortless relicensing, from estimation to final payment and includes any relicensing discounts you’ve negotiated. You no longer have to cringe when asked, “how much will it cost…?”

More Help

If you get stuck in the licensing process or have questions our professional services team is at the ready.  Our staff has been in the licensing business for over 15 years and can help resolve your rights issues.

Get Started

To learn more give us call at 888-245-1722, email info at rightspro.com, visit http://rightspro.com, or jump right in and sign up.