Copyright in the Digital Workspace, a report available from the Copyright Clearance Center, has a checklist at the end suggesting why companies might want a "copyright compliance solution," naturally one provided by the CCC. I was especially amused by question 11, "Does your company advocate a culture of openness, sharing and the free flow of information and ideas?" If that's true, or if you depend on product or service innovation to maintain or grow market share (Q1) or you might have a few disgruntled employees lurking in the background (Q4), the CCC is there for you.

The report suggests that businesspeople generally know that copyright is an issue that's out there, but think that their own activities -- forwarding articles to interested people, usually -- are not problematic. And, especially when they're forwarding links or articles on the web (the report doesn't seem to distinguish these two activities, which are functionally the same during the period that the articles are freely available on the web), it doesn't seem problematic to me either. But I'm not the CCC.