Licensing

VG WORT Digital Copyright License

Copyright compliance made easy for German companies

The German collecting society, VG WORT, and RightsDirect developed the VG WORT Digital Copyright License specifically for the needs of German companies and their worldwide subsidiaries.

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Features

  • The license includes digital rights from hundreds of thousands of rightsholders, including world-renowned publishers, and covers millions of German and international publications
  • This license covers employees globally, facilitating efficient collaboration while respecting the intellectual property of others

Benefits

  • Reduce the amount of time spent verifying rights and obtaining individual permissions
  • Demonstrate the organization’s respect for the intellectual property of others and a commitment to corporate social responsibility
  • Collaborate across borders using published content
  • Supports compliance initiatives and AI governance programs

What you can do with the VG WORT Digital Copyright License

  • Reuse

    • Email a PDF of a journal article to a colleague in conjunction with a collaborative project you are working on together
    • Post an article to the intranet for employee awareness
    • Submit supporting articles to a government authority as required as part of a regulatory or patent filing
    • Automate literature triaging and review, prioritizing articles of interest and identifying common themes, trends, and conflicting findings

  • Store

    • Store documents related to a project to corporate-owned hard drives, network, or collaboration tool for use by the project team
    • Save articles as supporting documentation for projects and/or internal use product literature databases

  • Copy

    • Distribute photocopies of a news articles at an internal meeting
    • Print out material that contains portions of a copyrighted work onto handouts for an internal presentation

How the VG WORT Digital Copyright License supports German companies

Reduce Challenges

Technology makes it easy to share content with colleagues around the world. The VG WORT Digital Copyright License reduces copyright challenges when storing documents in personal databases, submitting them to government agencies, sending PDFs via email, and using content with internal AI applications.

Demonstrates respect for intellectual property

The VG WORT Digital Copyright License demonstrates a business’ commitment to corporate social responsibility, respect for intellectual property, and regard for researchers and their work.

Global reuse and storage rights for millions of content sources

The VG WORT Digital Copyright License minimizes the complexity of reuse rights by offering a single, enterprise-wide, global licensing solution. It enables German-based companies to collaborate on published professional content, includes rights from participating rightsholders to use lawfully acquired content in the full spectrum of AI-assisted content use — including training, RAG, and everyday employee interactions with AI tools — accelerate business results, and simplify copyright compliance across geographic boundaries.

Receive ongoing support

VG WORT licensees have access to helpful resources to educate employees and assist with developing and promoting compliance programs. Instructor-led trainings incorporate group discussions, question and answer sessions, and analysis of real-world scenarios.
In addition, licensees have access to our online Customer Resource Center which includes:

  • Videos about international copyright, in German and English
  • Reports, market research, and European Commission initiatives related to copyright
  • Tools and guidelines
  • Up-to-date international copyright news

Featured resources

Insight

10 Copyright Mistakes (German)

Any of these mistakes increases your company’s risk for copyright infringement. The VG WORT Digital Copyright License can help minimize those risks.

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