Copyright law and content rights management have always evolved to accommodate changes in technology and in user needs. Users today have more access to more content in the online digital environment and can do much more with such content than ever before.

Collective rights management (usually conducted through collective management organizations, or CMOs) pools the availability of content to benefit both rightsholders (i.e., authors and publishers) and users, moving from obtaining permission to use one content resource from one author to virtually all content in different sectors, from music to film to text. In the publishing context, many CMOs offer expansive databases of research content and new methods of utilizing such content such as through text and data mining—the ability to search across multiple data sets using tools designed to normalize methods and terminology to identify key connections and insights.

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Historical Changes

While the availability of "born digital" content that can be indexed and repurposed represents the latest technological changes for content and copyright law, this kind of experimentation is nothing new for authors, publishers or copyright law.