US music rights management company BMI has clinched victory in a rate court dispute against live events promoters Live Nation, AEG, and the North American Concert Promoters Association (NACPA). The win will see songwriters get a 138% increase in rates to 0.5% of every event’s revenue. BMI described the ruling handed down by New York District Court Judge Louis Stanton as a decision that ends “decades of below-market rates for songwriters, composers and publishers in the live concert industry.”
Source: BMI beats rate court dispute vs concert promoters, giving songwriters 138% raise in US
Last month, amid TikTok’s long-running licensing talks with the major labels, it came to light that the ByteDance-owned platform had started limiting the availability of certain music in Australia. Now, a new report suggests that the pilot – designed to demonstrate the app’s purportedly minimal reliance on popular tracks – brought about a usership decline in the island nation. The short-form app last summer moved to trademark “TikTok Music,” and it subsequently emerged that the rumored streaming-service expansion was factoring into the aforesaid licensing discussions.
After nearly three years of litigation, federal judge John G. Koeltl ruled that the Internet Archive infringed the copyrights of four plaintiff publishers by scanning print editions of their books and lending them online. “At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book,” Koeltl wrote.
In recent weeks, publishing executives have begun examining the extent to which their content has been used to “train” AI tools such as ChatGPT, how they should be compensated and what their legal options are. “We have valuable content that’s being used constantly to generate revenue for others off the backs of investments that we make, that requires real human work, and that has to be compensated,” said Danielle Coffey, executive vice president and general counsel of the News Media Alliance.
With the release of their song Fish Market in 1989, the Jamaican duo Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson inadvertently changed the course of pop music. Now, more than 30 years after Fish Market was released, Steely & Clevie Productions is suing three of reggaeton’s most celebrated hitmakers – El Chombo, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee – for what they characterize as unlawful interpolation of Fish Market’s rhythm (or “riddim”), and are seeking the credit – and royalties.
The UK’s Council of Music Makers – the umbrella body for the Ivors Academy, FAC, MMF, MPG and Musicians’ Union – has published ‘five foundational changes’ that it would like to see. They include a “modern, minimum digital royalty rate” for all featured artists, with unrecouped balances “written off after a term, on a rolling basis, without any additional conditions”.
Over the course of the 90-minute hearing, Judge John G. Koeltl appeared unmoved by the IA’s fair use claims and unconvinced that the publishers’ market for library e-books was not impacted by the practice known as controlled digital lending. “To say that this case is about the ability of a library to lend a book that it owns ignores whether the library has a right to copy wholesale the book,” Koeltl offered at one point.