Working with Shareable Links

Contents

• Working with Shareable Links
  • How does a Shareable Link Work?
  • History Records
  • Creating a Shareable Link

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In the cases of regular and ongoing partnerships between IPCs and LCHs, the standard licensing workflow used by DBL provides many benefits, such as notifications for requests and responses, the ability to maintain specific licensing documents for selected LCH partners, the storeage of final license agreement texts, and automatic handling of agreement expiries. However, these features and benefits require that each content recipient is established as a full LCH organization within DBL. In some cases this may not be the most reasonable or efficient option due to the initial ‘cost’ of providing orientation to DBL for to the new LCH, or because the current need is a one-time request. In other cases all licensing details may have already been handled entirely outside of DBL.

In scenarios such as these, an additional method is available for securely releasing content from DBL. This is done using a shareable link. Sharable links funtion in a manner similar to features found other file sharing tools, such as the “Copy Dropbox Link” option in Dropbox, or the “Get Sharable Link” option in Google Drive. The notable exception is that shareable links from DBL last for only 3 days, and automatically expire 24 hours after first use.

Tip

Shareable links make it possible for an IPC to retain the use of DBL within their own content management process, even if a variety of recipients are not registered DBL organizations.

Warning

There are significant limitations to the use of shareable links (compared with the standard licening workflow), including:

• DBL does NOT record or maintain any specific agreement text related to the release of the content.
• DBL does NOT provide API access to the released entry content, entry metadata, or ongoing information on updates to the content.
• The recipient using this method CANNOT return to DBL to look for updates to the content or continue to access it in any way after the link has expired.

In other words, this method has not been designed as replacement for a full licensing workflow within DBL, where that is possible and reasonable to achieve between partners.

How does a Shareable Link Work?

A DBL shareable link is a private and temporary Internet address. The link will cause DBL to return to the person who accesses it the specific content which was selected by the IPC Licenser who created the link.

The creator and recipient of the link share a common passcode, which restricts access to the content to only individuals who know the passcode. By default, DBL prompts the person creating a shareable link to use the recipient’s email address as a passcode. If an email address is used, DBL will send a notification message to the recipent informing them of the content which has been made available.

Shareable links remain available for access for a maximum of 72 hours (3 days) from the time that they were created. Links will expire 24 hours after they are first accessed by someone who authenticates themselves with the passcode.

History Records

DBL adds a record to the IPC’s organization history for the events of 1) creating a shareable link and 2) access and download of content using a shareable link.

Creating a Shareable Link

The detailed steps for this process are outlined in the Contributors > Releasing Content with Shareable Links section of this manual.