ABSTRACT
The high administrative and clearance costs associated with using third party copyright in multimedia production and the wide-ranging skills required by the production team is increasingly driving producers towards collaborative production. For rights holders controlling archives of footage, programming, stills and text, collaborative production offers a means of releasing or enhancing the value of the assets held in the archive. For production companies, broadcasters, software houses and other multimedia developers, access to archive material offers an alternative to the painstaking and expensive business of clearing many hundreds of individual items of third-party copyright material. Collaborative ventures are an especially attractive option for many educational institutions who have a great deal of expertise to offer, particularly at the cutting edges of new technologies and in higher level educational development, but who have neither the production experience nor the financial backing to enter production alone. Collaboration for them may be in consortia made up of many other similar institutions, or a mixture of educational institutions and commercial developers, or with commercial interests alone.
