The Orphan Works Directive was adopted in October 2012 and sought to facilitate the mass digitisation projects going on across Europe by removing some copyright barriers. It created an exception to copyright, so that the digitisation and dissemination of orphan works could be done without necessarily seeking permission from every rights holder.
Source: Evaluating the Orphan Works Directive | Europeana Pro
YouTube has always been important to the music business. Now, with YouTube Music, it’s trying to build a music universe Spotify and Apple can’t touch. YouTube doesn’t want to be the place users discover new songs, only to leave and pay $10 a month to stream them on Spotify. It wants to put the entire music business onto a single platform.
Source: Inside YouTube’s plan to win the music-streaming wars
The dynamics of streaming are fundamentally different to the old-world, which means contracts based on “unit sales” risk being redundant in a market based increasingly on streaming. As a result, we need fundamental changes such as the writing-off of unrecouped balances after a set period of time, say 15 years, and a modern and fair artist royalty rate on all digital revenues.
Source: Trying to Free Streaming Theater From Equity’s Headlock
Amazon hopes to protect online streaming content with a newly awarded anti-piracy patent. The company has developed a technique where personally identifiable information can be dynamically added to streaming content, visibly or not. This is a relatively low-resource option to detect the source of pirated movies, TV-shows, and even live events.
Source: Amazon Patents Technology to Track Down Streaming Pirates * TorrentFreak
China is becoming a particularly interesting hotspot for the DIY artist market – with the territory’s two biggest streaming platform operators, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music, duking it out for supremacy. Back in July, Tencent Music revealed that it had paid 590 million yuan (over $84m) to date to indie artists using its ‘Tencent Musician’ program.
It isn’t clear at the moment whether the films will be offered free to Disney+ subscribers, as with the Pixar film Soul, or for a premium charge as was done with Mulan. Still, it’s a bombshell development in the fast-changing theatrical/streaming landscape. The studio is looking at every option, and everything is under consideration and contingency planning, as Disney makes plans to lean in heavily on its direct-to-consumer initiative.
Source: Disney Mulling Pivot Of ‘Pinocchio’, ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Cruella’ From Theatrical To Disney+ Premieres
Even for astute followers of the discussions around the implementation of Article 17, the hearing contained a number of surprises. While several Member States have been soldiering on with their national implementation proposals the hearing showed that the Court is taking Poland’s complaint very seriously and that the compliance of the contested provisions of Article 17 with the Charter is far from evident.
CD Projekt Red is the first game developer to make it easier for streamers to sidestep music copyright violations. Cyberpunk 2077 is due to launch in about a month with a setting to disable copyrighted music. It allows streamers to avoid receiving DMCA strikes on their Twitch account.
Source: Games are Adapting to the Twitch DMCA Issue – Streamer-Friendly Mode
The news of the JV follows the announcement earlier this month that the Atlantic Screen Media fund, through which Atlantic Screen Music provides financing for the production of music scores – is raising £10 million ($13.2m) to invest in global streamed content IP, including music scores for film and television, plus comic books.