![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evolphin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/DRM-Expired.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWe live and work in a world where more media is created every day than the day before, and for content creators, keeping track of media licensing is increasingly burdensome. With so many photographers, camera ops, and musicians licensing their media for companies to use, making sure they are fairly paid for their work can be a full-time job.<\/p>\n
For small organizations, they might use a spreadsheet to track rights, but that requires a lot of manual labor and is very<\/i> open to mistakes. Unless you want to employ someone full-time managing rights and usage, you\u2019ll need to use a system designed for it that can lift most of the burden.<\/p>\n
However, many of the third party solutions that manage licensing are not connected to the actual content creation process. An admin must still manually input information into the system to keep it current. Just inputting where each file is used and when it expires wastes hours out of the day and still keeps the door open to human error.<\/p>\n
When the system monitoring your work in progress workflow is also monitoring licensing, it allows for events and notifications to be triggered with licensing in mind. If an asset\u2019s license has expired, the DAM can prevent users from using the asset. It can also send notifications to stakeholders when an asset is about to expire.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If the DAM is connected to the publishing step of your workflow (say, to social media), it can track where a finished video or image has been published for running reports or taking action later if the licensing changes.<\/p>\n
Legal departments love having a full DAM involved in licensing, so they have an audit trail of the usage of licensed content, which may also be useful in future disputes.<\/p>\n
However\u2026.<\/p>\n
Knowing when assets expire and where finished content is published is great. But you also need to know what project<\/i> each individual asset is used in if you want to take action.<\/p>\n
For example, if your company licensed a music track for a year for any number of online videos, when the year is up, you need to know which videos used the track. If you can\u2019t extend the license, you need to re-edit the videos or take them down from where they are published.<\/p>\n
The Evolphin Zoom DAM has the answer, out-of-the-box. Each of the Evolphin plugins for the Adobe Creative Cloud extracts a list of all the linked files used in the project and stores it in the Zoom database. When you select a project in Zoom, you can quickly see a list of all the assets used within.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evolphin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/zoom-rights-management.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
It works in both directions as well, so when you’re viewing a file, you can see a list of all the projects using it. In our scenario above, you can immediately see which videos need to be re-edited.<\/p>\n
With Zoom\u2019s smart archive management, if the raw media has been archived to S3 or elsewhere, you can easily restore only the assets used in the project. Your licensing headache has just become a very manageable task.<\/p>\n
For more information on how Zoom can help manage your licensed media, click the button below!<\/p>\n