How Do They Figure?

One of the responsibilities that I have at work is to educate faculty about license agreements for books, DVDs, and software. Many materials have license agreements which state that they cannot be loaned, copied, or downloaded in any fashion. For some materials, there is an additional cost for a license agreement which would allow circulation or downloading of an item. Depending on the item, this cost can range from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. This led me to ask the question: how are the costs for public performance rights, classroom performance rights, or circulation rights calculated?

I figured the U.S. Copyright Office would be a good place to start. There I found links to other organizations that handle copyright and trademark issues, including the Copyright Clearance Center. The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) will tell you exactly how much it costs for permission to distribute copies of an article or a book chapter to a class, so I figured that they would have an answer to my question.

The answer was not obvious, so I emailed CCC to get more information. I am still waiting after two days, and still searching for the answer.