DDEX – RightsTech Project

Sin screen-shot-2016-03-22-at-16-56-17 ce the demise of the long-running-but-never-launched Global Repertoire Database (GRD) there has been a lot of debate over what comes next for digital rights reporting. The songwriter class action suits in the US against Spotify are the natural outcome of more than one and a half decades of failing to deal with the forsaken mess that is compositional rights in the digital era.

The music industry needs a solution and now just like busses that never come, two arrive at once: Google’s Open Source Validation Tool for DDEX Standard (doesn’t sound too sexy I know, but bear with me on this one) and Canadian PRO (Performing Rights Organization) SOCAN has acquired Medianet essentially as a digital rights reporting play. So just what is going on in the world of digital rights reporting?

Source: Medianet, SOCAN, YouTube And The Kobalt Effect | Music Industry Blog

YouTube has built a new tool which it says will deliver ‘more accurate reporting of music content’ to music publishers and collection societies. As a result, the Google-owned business believes it will set into motion ‘a faster and more accurate payout and distribution of royalties’.

The new tech is pretty… technical sounding: a new open-source implementation and validation tool for DDEX’s Digital Sales Report Flat File (DSRF). In a nutshell, that’s the industry standard format for digital licensees to report sales and usage to music licensors for both audio and audio-visual content.

Source: YouTube launches tool to enable ‘faster, more accurate royalty distributions’ – Music Business Worldwide

RightsTech Extra

AI Companies Get the Picture

By Paul Sweeting

One of the biggest challenges facing copyright owners in grappling with the rapid development of generative AI technology, apart from a murky legal status, has been market failure, as discussed here in previous posts. The amount of existing material needed to train gen-AI models is so great, and so varied, that gauging the value of any one piece of it to establish a market price for it for licensing purposes is often effectively impossible. One group of rights owners is finding willing buyers among AI companies, however. An active, albeit for various reasons mostly sotto voce market has begun to emerge for the use of images held in large photo archives and by photo agencies and social media platforms, complete with per-unit industry and at least a nod toward creator attribution... Read More >>