Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA)

Copyrights

Background

The CLA exists to simplify copyright for content users and copyright owners, helping customers legally access, copy and share published content whilst making sure that copyright owners are paid fair royalties for the use of their work.

  • Industry sector: Copyrights
  • Services: Tech Consultancy. Solution & Infrastructure Architecture, Application Development, POC Validation
  • Website: www.cla.co.uk

Our contribution to CLA

Short Summary

Members of the Elemental team have worked with CLA over many years on a variety of projects to build, upgrade and improve core systems, to include the design of CLAs largest core back-office system.

Additionally, the Elemental team has played a key role in the design and implementation of the Azure based cloud infrastructure that supports many of the CLA systems.

Today EC continue to be a key ‘go-to’ supplier of IT development services across a variety of CLA areas of operations.

What we did

Most recently Elemental has been engaged to work on a variety of technical POCs using the unique blend of skills, experience, and functional knowledge across the EC team. This includes a deep understanding of the core business challenge of improving the efficiency of the collection of data.

Recent deliverables include a technical POC to demonstrate how CLA can digitise the process of assessing how customers are copying and using copyrighted materials. This will ensure the rights holders (authors/publishers) receive the appropriate royalties for use of their content.

Through the development of the POC, Elemental demonstrated the ability to integrate with the software deployed on Customer (ie schools / colleges) photocopiers and automatically scan to a central service. Then, using OCR technology, scan the copied material to assess if it was copyrighted so that usage of the content could be assigned to the correct rights holders.

This included the use of platforms such as Google Books to automate the process of identification as well as, in future, integrating with the CLA’s own databases to increase the accuracy of the process. This was all delivered using cloud based services readily available on the Azure and Google platforms, with EC providing the ‘glue’ to bring the disparate parts together.

EC’s role was key in identifying whether the technologies were mature enough to achieve the goal and to ultimately identify the correct architectures and tools to build a solution. The project required working collaboratively with 3rd party vendors across the globe.

This solution will transform CLA’s current manual paper collection activities.