December, 2018

In order to tighten the way money passes to rights-holders, the Copyright Office needs to settle on a number of meticulous decisions such as whether the new collective should take on debt, how or if it should hold reserve funds, how to deal with unclaimed royalties and — perhaps most crucially — how to set up a central database that will ideally tie together all the scattered metadata from recordings, rights management groups and digital service providers.

Source: The Music Modernization Act’s Biggest Battle Is Still Ahead

While the prohibitive costs of the necessary music licenses has made launching a new streaming service next to impossible, Neil Young is trying a different approach by rolling out a platform that only offers his own music, in joint venture with Warner music that might actually be successful.

Source: Neil Young Launches Personal Streaming Service That Could Actually Work

Blockchain represents a fundamental business model shift: from value extraction in closed ecosystems to value capture in open ecosystems. The problem is that, while incumbents have figured out how to extract value in closed ecosystems (restrictive monetary policies, locks on transfers, fees, etc.), new entrants have yet to figure out how to capture value in open ecosystems.

Source: Blockchain Gaming: Separating Signal from the Noise – CoinDesk

Media giant Comcast Corporation, through its Comcast Cable Advertising division, will be releasing peer-to-peer platform Blockgraph, that allows companies to better control data shared with others. Comcast sees the exchange of data becoming more efficient and secure, with the cutting out of a centralized third party that traditionally has been needed for preserving anonymity of data on consumer preferences.

Source: Comcast to launch blockchain platform for data management in 2019

The three most active ‘copyright owners’ have asked Google to remove more than a billion allegedly infringing links from its search engine results. While more than 160,000 rightsholders have asked Google to remove content, 0.0001% are responsible for the majority of the flagged links.

Source: Top 3 Copyright ‘Owners’ Sent Google a Billion Takedown Requests – TorrentFreak

After a relatively smooth debut on the New York Stock Exchange, Spotify is inspiring a handful of other music tech companies to consider launching their own IPOs. But is this nudge grounded in substantial evidence of the music industry’s newfound financial strength — or just another instance of unfounded hype?

Source: More Music Tech Companies Mulling IPO After Spotify’s Smooth Debut — But Is It Really a Good Idea?

Wixen Music Publishing and Spotify have put aside a potentially costly lawsuit filed by the publisher late last year that alleged the streaming service had been using tens of thousands of its songs without a license. In the original filing, dated Dec. 29, 2017, Wixen sought damages worth at least $1.6 billion.

Source: Spotify and Wixen Music Publishing End Dispute Over Song Licensing

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films.

Source: For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

For the past few weeks, media business lobbyists have been pushing the Senate to pass the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017, which passed the House of Representatives in April. The battle that has ensued makes little sense.

Source: Crazy About Copyright: Why the Debate Over the Register of Copyrights Doesn’t Make Much Sense (Column)