There are new kinds of business relationships, new technological requirements and more advanced technologies, new methods for sharing content, and totally new types of content such as hybrids from multiple sources for print, streaming media and interactive. Today, in most shops, repurposing consists mostly of cutting and pasting since there is no reliable way to automatically retrieve similar types of content. Also, lack of agreement among publishers on how to describe various pieces of content makes aggregation very difficult. For instance, when Getty Images acquires a new company, all of the new images must be integrated into the existing collection. And what makes it even worse is that there is no common language among software tools that create, store and manipulate these pieces of content.
Syndication is also a challenge.
And that information must be available mostly automatically. Some of the kinds of restrictions that need to be considered are geographic, time, language, market, format, alterations, and exclusive use. Knowledge is also required about use of freelancers' work, for instance, and whether content can be used on a partner's website and so on. Today, rights and permissions are dealt mostly via phone calls, pencil and paper, email, faxes and paper contracts via mail. Another issue that frustrates publishers and consumers alike is that there is no way to find separate pieces of content that were published together at one point in time, such as the New York Times special supplement.