Copyright

Wagging Music Publishing’s Long Tail

Bill ColitreLast week’s announcement that the U.S. Copyright Office had successfully accepted a bulk submission of notices of intent (NOIs) for compulsory mechanical licenses in electronic form marked a major milestone, both for the Office and for Music Reports Inc., which delivered the NOIs on behalf of music streaming service Guvera.

Music Reports has been working with the Copyright Office for more than a decade as part of the Office’s fitful, and at times halfhearted, effort to upgrade the creaky, pre-digital process for submitting and accessing music publishing information to at least 20th century standards if not quite 21st. Last week’s successful test run on the Office’s new, electronic submission system, involving about 100 tracks, is believed to be the first such hand-off.

“We’re now ready to start doing this at scale. It’s a big, big step,” Music Report’s VP and general counsel Bill Colitre told RightsTech.com.

But it was only one step toward solving what Colitre says is a much bigger problem: the vast and fast-growing amount of music being released on digital platforms today for which publishing information is not available, if it was ever collected in the first place.

U.S. Copyright Office Clears Path for Digital Compulsory Licenses 

Until recently, NOIs had to be filed manually, by paper and under a prohibitive pricing structure. So if you started a service and had the publishing data for say 5 million songs, but did not have the information for another 500,000 songs, the service would need to file NOIs, saying it is licensing and using those songs with the Copyright Office. That process would cost $75 to register for the filing of all those songs, and $2 a song, or about $1 million. Also, the NOI for each song would need to be filed individually, although they could all be batch delivered to the Copyright Office.

But about two months ago, the Copyright Office revamped the way it is willing to accept NOIs and changed its pricing structure. Now, NOIs can be filed on excel spreadsheets, with something like 20 columns of relevant data needed to be completed for each song. This electronic filing still requires an upfront fee of $75 but it now only costs 10 cents a track. So now, filing NOIs for 500,00 songs will only cost $50,075, instead of $1.000075 million.

Source: U.S. Copyright Office Clears Path for Digital Compulsory Licenses | Billboard

Brexit Is “Major Blow” to Film, TV Industries 

Film and television producers worry the Brexit will create uncertainty and could unravel much of the financial infrastructure the independent industry relies on.

“The decision to exit the European Union is a major blow to the U.K. film and TV industry,” said Michael Ryan, chairman of the Independent Film & Television Alliance in a statement. “This decision has just blown up our foundation – as of today, we no longer know how our relationships with co-producers, financiers and distributors will work, whether new taxes will be dropped on our activities in the rest of Europe or how production financing is going to be raised without any input from European funding agencies. The U.K. creative sector has been a strong and vibrant contributor to the economy – this is likely to be devastating for us.”

Source: Brexit Is “Major Blow” to Film, TV Industries – Hollywood Reporter

Britain Votes to Exit European Union: Musicians and Celebs React 

A victory for so-called Brexit campaigners sees the U.K. depart from the 28-state economic and political union, which was formally established in 1993.

For the music industry, the outcome of the national vote carries huge consequences and has the potential to impact on everything from touring to record sales to copyright legislation. One thing is certain: the industry will be dealing with a new national leader by October. In the hours after the nation’s votes were counted, the prime minister David Cameron announced his resignation.

Source: Britain Votes to Exit European Union: Musicians and Celebs React | Billboard

Rocking the Rights-Tech Boat in a Safe Harbor

Any day now, according to the scuttlebutt in copyright policy circles, the U.S. Copyright Office could release its findings from its study of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ordered up last year by the House Judiciary Committee, which is conducting a review of the DMCA and U.S. copyright law in general. Along with those findings, the Copyright Office is widely expected to offer recommendations to Congress for changes to the 512 “safe harbor” provisions, including perhaps replacing the current “notice-and-takedown” rules with a “notice-and-staydown”
requirement.

European Lawmakers Urge Tightening of Safe Harbor Exemptions

Fifty-eight members of European Parliament have signed on to a letter urging the European Commission to protect rights holders by clarifying the status of YouTube and other services that operate under safe harbor laws.

“Despite the fact that more creative content is being consumed today than ever before, on services such as user-uploaded content platforms and content aggregation services, the creative sectors have not seen a comparable increase in revenues from this increase in consumption,” the EMP’s letter reads. “One of the main reasons is being referred to as a transfer of value that has emerged due to the lack of clarity regarding the status of these online services under copyright and e-commerce law.”

Source: European Lawmakers Urge Tightening of Safe Harbor Exemptions | Billboard

To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question

For the music industry, the outcome of the national vote — which polls suggest remains tightly split between those for and against a British exit, dubbed Brexit — carries huge consequences and has the potential to impact on everything from touring to record sales to copyright legislation.

“A victory for Brexit would be economically, politically, socially and culturally disastrous — for all of us,” reads a joint letter from Beggars Group founder Martin Mills and Universal Music U.K. chairman and Chief Executive David Joseph, urging staff and colleagues to vote for staying in the E.U..

Source: To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question | Billboard

Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Petition Digital Copyright Reform 

For the last three months, the music industry has been fighting — or at least negotiating in public — with YouTube. Now, artists are adding their voices.

In an ad that will run Tuesday through Thursday in the Washington DC magazines Politico, The Hill, and Roll Call, 180 performers and songwriters are calling for reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which regulates copyright online. A range of big names from every genre signed the ad — from Taylor Swift to Sir Paul McCartney, Vince Gill to Vince Staples, Carole King to the Kings of Leon — as did 19 organizations and companies, including the major labels.

Source: Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Petition Digital Copyright Reform | Billboard

How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

If you’ve ever considered downloading a digital image of an artwork from a museum’s website, you probably know rather well that the world of copyright is an incredibly murky and difficult one to navigate. Even if artworks are in the public domain — in the US, this means copyright has expired, 70 years after an artist’s death — many cultural institutions still claim copyright on the digital representations that they have created and share on their websites. While exceptions largely allow users to download these pictures for personal, noncommercial, or educational purposes, these online legal conditions are often still difficult to completely understand, or sometimes, even find.

Display At Your Own Risk is a primarily web-based experimental exhibition that examines the current status of digital cultural heritage and public accessibility to it through the online collections of some of the world’s most physically frequented museums.

Source: How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

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