featured

Annual Global Royalty Collections Hit $10.8 Billion in 2016

November 15, 2017By Paul Sweeting

Score one for the power of collection rights management. The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), which represents over 230 authors societies in the music, audiovisual, literary, dramatic, and visual arts industries around the world, released its annual Global Collections Report this week which showed global royalty collections by its member organizations reaching a record €9.2 billion (US $10.8 billion) in 2016, up 6 percent from 2015.

Music royalties, which make up the bulk of CISAC-member collections, rose 7 percent for the year, to €8.0 billion (US $9.4 billion) powered by rapid growth in streaming services in several major markets. The U.S. and Canada saw the biggest increase, at 12.5 percent, followed by the Asia-Pacific region, which grew 10.3 percent.

Use of collectively managed works, primarily music, in traditional TV and radio programming accounted for the largest slice of the collections pie, at 42.8 percent, followed by live performances and background uses, at 29.6 percent. Digital uses, however, which include music and video streaming, saw the fastest year-over-year growth, surging 51.4 percent, and now account for 10.4 percent of all collections worldwide.

The reported noted that sluggish growth in collections from video streaming services in some markets prevented the digital category from growing even faster. Declines in traditional TV viewing and the loss of viewers to over-the-top services actually led to a 1.4 percent year-over-year decline in collections from the traditional TV and radio channel.

Whether the overall surge in royalty collections by CMOs is translating into higher payments to artists and creators, however, remains a matter of contention in many creative industries, particularly music. Many songwriters, for instance, have seen their incomes fall as the bulk of music industry revenue as shifted from the sale of individual recordings to collectively managed streaming licenses.

CISAC executive director Gadi Oron, however, sees the latest results as a vindication of collective management.

“This year’s report shows the system of collective management of creators’ rights is robust, successful and ready for more growth, he said in a statement. “The big traditional revenue streams, led by broadcast and live performance, remain stable and strong. Digital royalties continue to surge and in some markets already overtake other forms of income.”

CISAC president Jean-Michel Jarre, however, himself an electronic music composer, acknowledged artists’ frustrations with current revenue flows, but put the blame on digital platforms rather than on any shortcomings in the collective-management system per se.

“Despite [the sector’s]growth…collections are nowhere near the level they should be,” he said. “Large industries that use creative content are driving down the value of our works. A simple illustration of this is the ‘transfer of value’ in the digital market where platforms such as YouTube are paying mere crumbs to authors.”

The full, 72-page report can be downloaded here.

Announcing RightsTech@DEW

October 25, 2017By rightstech

We’re pleased to announce the official dates for the next RightsTech@DEW conference. The event will be held on February 5 and 6, 2018, at the Marina Del Rey Marriott in Los Angeles as part of Digital Media Wire’s Digital Entertainment World expo.

The RightsTech Project will host a dedicated track of panels, presentations, and keynotes on each day of the expo, while attendees will enjoy access to the entire two-day expo, including tracks on movies and television, games and interactive entertainment, brands and advertising, VR and AR, and more.

Topics in the RightsTech track will include:

The future of machine-readable rights
Solving music’s black-box data problem
Hollywood and blockchain
Alternative financing models for artists and creators
Rights, derivative works, and user-generated content
Artificial intelligence
Metadata
Registration and authentication
Valuing rights and royalties
and more

For information on how to register click here. For RightsTech speaking opportunities contact Paul Sweeting at [email protected]. For sponsorship opportunities contact Andrea Elliott at [email protected]. For all other inquiries contact Tinzar Sherman at [email protected].

Creative Ghosts in the Machine

October 18, 2017By Paul Sweeting

One of the highlights of last month’s RightsTech Summit was the riveting debate between Ed Klaris of KlarisIP and Drew Silverstein of Amper Music over who (or what?) should own the copyright on musical works produced autonomously by a computer powered by artificial intelligence software.

Ed Klaris, left, and Drew Silverstein at the RightsTech Summit

Klaris was clear that whoever owns the rights, it’s not the machine. Even the most autonomous of A.I. agents, he argued, by definition cannot exercise the sort of creativity and originality that U.S. copyright law requires without human input. Therefore, any originality in the work, the sine qua non of copyright, comes from humans and the copyright belongs to some human entity, whether individual or corporate.

Silverstein, whose company markets an A.I.-based music composer and performer, argued for a more expansive view of machine-made music. Claims being advanced on, or on the behalf of software output are inevitable, he proposed and it is too soon to take a categorical position on their merits.

The 30-minute debate, fascinating as it was, obviously didn’t settle the argument, which is really just getting underway. U.S. copyright law is clear on the need for a human author. It’s goal, after all, is to incentivize human creativity. But the line between man and machine is only likely to get fuzzier as technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality advance. How and where to draw that line is bound to become contentious.

The Hollywood Reporter Esq. columnist Eriq Gardner flags a fascinating case involving an infringement claim brought by the maker of MOVA, a computer-based system that captures human facial expressions and uses them to create photo-realistic graphic effects, against several Hollywood studios that used a an allegedly purloined version of MOVA to create effects in blockbuster movies, including Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Deadpool, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, among others.

The plaintiff in the case, MOVA inventor Rearden LLC, makes a number of patent and trademark claims related to the studios’ use of an allegedly stolen version of MOVA. But it also makes the jaw-dropping claim that any originality in the creative output of the MOVA system is the result not of any human input but to the design of the system itself, and therefore Rearden owns the copyright on that output.

Rearden was founded in 1999 by Silicon Valley inventor Steve Perlman, who claims to own the MOVA software. In 2012, Perlman transferred the MOVA assets to a second company, OnLive Inc. At that point, Perlman alleges, two of his then-employees secretly formed another company and negotiated the acquisition of OnLive and the MOVA assets. In 2013 those assets were sold to Chinese investors, who transferred them around among multiple corporate entities. At the same time, the MOVA technology was licensed in the U.S. exclusively to effects-house Digital Domain 3.0, which used the technology to produce graphics work for the studio defendants.

Rearden, meanwhile, sued the Chinese companies and last year won an injunction that bars Digital Domain from continuing to use the MOVA technology.

The studio defendants, Disney, Fox and Paramount, do not dispute that the MOVA technology may have been stolen. But they strongly reject the claim that the owner of MOVA, whether Rearden or someone else, also owns the copyright on the work it produces. What show up on the screen, they claim, is chiefly the result of human inputs, from the film’s direction, the performances of the actors, and the photography of the cinematographer. To argue that the owner of the effects software also owns its output, the studios say, makes no more sense than arguing that Microsoft owns the copyright on any work produced using Word, or Adobe any work produced in Photoshop.

Rearden is having none of it, and here is the nut of its argument as spelled out in the complaint:

[H]ere, the work at issue is the program’s output, in particular, the three-dimensional Captured Surface and Tracking Mesh. The MOVA Contour system takes two-dimensional camera captures as input, and the program then synthesizes them into three-dimensional outputs with subtlety and artistry, based on creative choices made by its programmers and embodied in its copyrighted software instructions…[D]uring MOVA Contour performance capture, the director cannot choose camera angles because the cameras are fixed in the MOVA Contour rigging; there can be no “selecting and arranging the costume, draperies, and other various accessories,” because the capture is of only the random patterns on the actor’s face and neck; and there can be no “arranging and disposing the light and shade,” because the lighting is also fixed in the rigging, and a random pattern of glowing makeup applied to the actor’s skin eliminates shadows for an evenly-lit random pattern.

Similarly, defendants’ argument that Rearden’s claim is analogous to Microsoft claiming a copyright in a book by an author who used Word to write it, or Adobe claiming a copyright in the artwork by an artist who used Photoshop to create it are equally inapt. Generally, an author writes a book by typing every word into a Word document, and an artist creates a work of art by deciding on specific treatment of every pixel in a Photoshop file. But in neither case does their work provide input to software that synthesizes an original expression that is distinct from the author’s or artist’s input. Here, neither the actor nor the director create a Captured Surface or Tracking Mesh output. The actor performs, and a director may direct the performance, and two-dimensional glowing random patterns are captured. But the works at issue here are not the two-dimensional captures; rather, the works at issue are the MOVA Contour program’s output, in particular, the three dimensional Captured Surface and Tracking Mesh created entirely by the MOVA Contour program.

It’s a bold argument, and there’s no telling at this point how a court might ultimately rule on it. The argument over whether the tool maker or the tool user is the author of what the tool helps create may be settled as a matter of law. But as the tools grow ever more sophisticated, the debate over how to tell the difference is far from over.

Featured image: Google DeepDream

RightsTech Summit 2017 in Pictures

October 11, 2017By rightstech

The second annual RightsTech Summit drew a full house last month at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Highlights included fireside chats with glass artist and Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, and associate register of copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office Robert Kasunic; lively discussions of how artists working in different media are leveraging technology to finance and distribute their work, and how investors calculate the value of rights and royalty streams; panels on blockchain, metadata, and licensing hubs; and a robust debate over who (or what?) should own the rights to works created by artificial intelligence agents.

It also featured some robust networking and schmoozing. Here’s some of what it looked like:

[slideshow_deploy id=’4915′]

Art World Looks to Blockchain to Pump Up Online Sales

October 3, 2017By Paul Sweeting

Global sales of art works amount to roughly $45 billion a year, but in 2016 only $3.75 billion of that — less than 10 percent of the total — was transacted online, according to the Hiscox Online Art Report, making the art and collectibles trade a laggard in the world of e-commerce.

A big part of the reason for the lack of a more robust online marketplace is the high potential for fraud — already a $6 billion a year problem in the art world — when buying artworks sight-unseen except in digital form. Copies and knockoffs can be passed off as originals, “limited” editions can overstep their limits, certificates of authenticity can forged.

Verisart CEO Robert Norton

Several startups have have launched in recent years to tackle that problem, including Verisart, ascribe, and Tagsmart, by providing artists the means to assert their authorship and issue time-stamped, digitally signed certificates of authenticity (COAs) by registering the information on a blockchain. But online sales have yet to scale using that artist-by-artist, piece-meal approach.

Now, Burbank, Calif.-based Verisart is looking to go the wholesale route through a partner certification program and API for online sellers and galleries. Last week, it announced its first such partnership, with online gallery Avant Arte.

Under the deal, Avant Arte will apply Verisart’s certification standards across all its represented artists and sales of limited edition artworks. Each certificate will be optimized for both physical and digital use with a unique QR code, blockchain timestamp and web address.

Speaking at the RightsTech Summit in New York last week, Verisart CEO Robert Norton said, “As online retailers and galleries look to improve certification standards, we’re seeing increasing demand for blockchain enabled certificates and we’re delighted to work with Avant Arte as our first limited edition print partner.”

Added Avant Arte ATO Nico Veenman, “By partnering with Verisart, we’re applying two factor validation of ownership by combining a physical ownership certificate and a digital certificate on the blockchain including immutable and authorized information about the artwork edition.”

Avant Arte is the first company to use the Verisart’s partner API allowing bulk transfer of data and certificate customization.

(Cover image: Wikimedia Commons)

RightsTech Summit Kicks Off September 27th

September 20, 2017By Paul Sweeting

The curtain will be going up next week on the second annual RightsTech Summit. Part of the two-day New York Media Festival the Summit will feature over 40 speakers from around the world and will bring together rights owners, creators, technology developers, policymakers and investors from across the full range of media sectors, for a unique, high-level discussion focused on technology innovation around the registration, management, licensing,

Jim McKelvey

and tracking of media rights and royalties on digital platforms.

From Monkey Business to Machine-Made Music

September 13, 2017By Paul Sweeting

With the long-running litigation between People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and photographer David Slater over the now world famous “monkey selfie” still pending before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the two sides have agreed to settle the case and have asked the court to dismiss the appeal, according to a joint statement put out by the parties.

But the settlement of the lawsuit isn’t likely to end the debate over how courts and the law should regard works created by non-human authors. In fact, the debate may only be getting started.

For one thing, as The Hollywood Reporter’s legal columnist Eriq Gardner notes, the “settlement” between PETA and Slater doesn’t fully settle the case between them. In their joint motion to the court to dismiss the appeal, the parties also ask that the original lower-court ruling that monkeys do not have standing to enforce claims under the Copyright Act. If granted, that would presumably leave the door open for PETA or someone else to bring a future claim with a different set of facts.

“PETA contends it would be just and proper to not bind Plaintiff Naruto [the monkey] by the judgment of the district court in light of the dispute concerning PETA’s status to file the complaint which resulted in that judgment,” the complaint says.

In a footnote, Slater’s side demurs, “Pursuant to the terms of the parties’ settlement agreement, Defendants also join PETA’s request for vacatur, without joining or taking any position as to the bases for that request.”

Moreover, the statement released by the parties does not say whether they have in fact agreed on who actually owns the copyright in the photographs taken by the Naruto. According to the statement, Slater has agreed to “donate 25% of future gross revenue from the Monkey Selfie photographs to charitable organizations dedicated to protecting and improving the welfare and habitat of Naruto and crested black macaques in Indonesia.”

Does that mean he has agreed to some sort of shared, or split ownership of the copyright between himself and some other entity on behalf of Naruto? Does PETA, or someone else, have the right to an accounting of Slater’s earnings from the photographs? Who will have standing to bring claims against future unlicensed uses? The statement doesn’t say.

Since the case was settled, whatever provisions the parties may have made with respect to those questions will remain private, and do not establish any sort of legal precedent. Yet, while monkeys may not be rushing to set up Instagram accounts to show off their selfies, works created through machine-learning processes and artificial intelligence are becoming more common. And the question of how (or whether) to fit works created by non-human agents into existing licensing structures is only likely to grow more urgent.

A.I. researchers researchers at Google, for instance, have taught an artificial neural network called Creatism to take aesthetically sophisticated photographs that in A/B tests many professional photographers were unable to distinguish from human-made shots.

Google arXiv

Music composed by artificial-intelligence agents is increasingly finding its way into the soundtracks of advertisements, videogames, apps, and other contexts where suitable human-authored works are either not available or too costly.

It may not be long before A.I.-composed pop tunes start turning up in Spotify playlists alongside the works of anonymous or pseudonymous artists already popping up there.

Those questions will be the focus of two special presentations at this month’s RightsTech Summit in New York.

In one, Edward Klaris, managing partner in the media and intellectual property law firm KlarisIP will offer a global perspective on artificial intelligence and copyright protections.

A second, roundtable presentation, will focus on the specific case of machine-made music. It will feature Drew Silverstein, founder and CEO of Amper Music, an A.I. composer, performer and producer for creating music for soundtracks, and Arnaud Decker of Luxembourg-based Aiva Technologies, which has developed the first A.I. agent to be registered with a collective rights management organization.

The RightsTech Summit will be held on September 27th at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower-Manhattan as part of the 2-day New York Media Festival. Click here for a full list of speakers at this year’s summit. Click here for information on how to register for the RightsTech Summit and the full NY Media Festival.

Carrying the Flag for Collective Rights Management

September 6, 2017By Paul Sweeting

In an age when new technology platforms, politics, and changing consumer behavior are posing existential challenges to the music publishing industry’s long-standing practices of collective rights management and blanket licensing, Paris-based Armonia Online is fighting to preserve the collective.

Formed in 2013 in response to the increasing fragmentation of the European licensing landscape — an unintended consequence of a European Union directive meant to encourage multi-territorial licenses — Armonia is an alliance of collective management organizations (CMOs) that offers one-stop, multi-territory licenses to digital service providers (DSPs) while preserving what it views as the important benefits to rights owners of collective management.

To achieve that goal, Armonia built a collaborative back-office technology platform that allows its member CMOs to harmonize their music-usage data processing and metadata management while preserving their own, proprietary payment arrangements with the songwriters and publishers they represent. The alliance now includes 9 CMOs and 3 mandates, representing over 13 million tracks.

In 2017, Armonia became a charter member of the RightsTech Project, and its CEO, Virginie Berger, will be speaking at the RightsTech Summit on September 27th in New York. We a recent Q&A with RightsTech, Berger discussed Armonia’s formation, its goals, and its views on the evolving role of collective rights management in a time of fragmenting markets.

RightsTech Project: What was the impetus for the formation of Armonia Online? What issue in the market are you trying to address?

Virginie Berger

Armonia Online In 2005, a Recommendation from the European Commission encouraged rights holders to grant multi-territorial licenses directly to digital service providers (DSPs) outside the scope of reciprocal agreements between author societies. This prompted many of the biggest publishers to withdraw mechanical rights from the authority of CMOs (Collective Management Organizations) on the Anglo-American works they represent (as well as some Latin-American and Asian works), in favour of direct licensing in European territories.

As a consequence of this repertoire fragmentation, the local CMOs cannot provide licenses with multi-territorial cover and the DSP has to contact the CMOs in all EU-member states as well as those rights holders that have withdrawn their rights. This poses major problems for all aspects of the licensing process such as identifying the repertoire which requires an additional license and the right holders associated with it.

Armonia Online was created to re-aggregate repertoires in Europe and to facilitate the grant of multi-territorial licenses, by acting as a one-stop shop for online music services wishing to enter Europe. Founded in 2013 by the Italian, Spanish and French collective societies (SIAE, SGAE and SACEM), the hub was joined since by SABAM (Belgium), Artisjus (Hungary), SUISA (Switzerland), SPA (Portugal) and AKM (Austria) and also represents the repertoires of three mandating entities: Universal Music Publishing International, Wixen Music, and SOCAN, for a total repertoire of 13 million musical works.

RTP: How has Armonia addressed that issue? What processes and capabilities did you have to put in place to meet your goals?

AO: The first challenge for our members was to organize themselves into a consortium at a time when the overall licensing market was getting more competitive. In the first place, the European collective societies had paradoxically to structure themselves together within a more competitive environment. In the mono-repertoire licensing system resulting from the fragmentation, smaller collective societies feared a loss of value of their repertoire as well as a leak of their members to the benefit of societies having bilateral agreements with the big publishers.

Armonia’s strength is that it maintains the value for all CMOs’ repertoires, since there is a single agreement on rates and tariffs with DSPs. This is mainly what Armonia has been working on during its first years of operation: how to streamline and harmonize processes within the member societies in order to facilitate and accelerate the granting of pan-European licenses for online services and music technologies. Thanks to these efforts, Armonia has signed deals with Deezer, YouTube, Google Play, Beatport, Guvera, or more recently with 7 Digital and Recisio.

Today Armonia is still working to de-mystify pan-European licensing, but the music rights industry is such a complex business that it takes a very long time to educate the market and the players, especially when they come from outside of the EU – and specifically from the US where the rules are completely different.

Finally, Armonia had to put in place a common initiative which resulted in the creation of a collaborative back office platform to process data and ensure a better identification of rights owners’ works.

RTP: Were you able to use existing technology to build your platform or did you need to develop new technologies/applications, etc.?

AO: To answer the challenges associated with the overwhelming volumes of data to process (around 0.5 TB of data in hundreds of files are sent every month by DSPs) and to avoid the redundancy of processes among the different societies, the Armonia members decided in the very early stages of their alliance to initiate a common back office system. In 2014, Armonia chose the Spanish start up BMAT to build this collaborative service platform for sales reports processing, acting as a trusted and neutral third-party.

The service platform built with BMAT takes the best and appropriate technologies available in the market and is fully scalable. As a first step, the technology enabled Armonia to have a common quality check of DSPs’ sales reports, a single repository with 10-year archive of sales reports as well as a mutualisation of business analysis. Then, Armonia developed metadata cleaning and enrichment to improve reports quality and automated matching, resulting in a faster and more accurate identification of works.

Today, the Armonia back office platform is processing at a speed of 2GB per minute and 72 billion of elements are transacted every month. We keep improving our technologies and developing our tools to improve the accuracy and timing of financial streams for rights-owners royalties’ payouts.

RTP: What are Armonia’s principal long-term goals, and how far along do you believe you are in reaching them? Where did you see Armonia Online ultimately fitting within the music licensing system?

AO: Armonia’s main goal is to sustain collective management of rights in an environment where its relevance tends to get undermined, despite being more crucial than ever for protecting authors’ rights.

Indeed, some entrepreneurs claim authors can bypass CMOs and have their rights managed more efficiently by some new innovative players. Yet CMOs are constantly investing in new ways and technologies to improve their processes. Often, the processing of the data for a given digital service cost more than the revenues it actually generates.

The CMOs within Armonia are not-for-profit and their one and only reason for doing business is to get more revenues to distribute to their members. SACEM for example, the French collective society, has never distributed as much money as it did in 2016. And CMOs always are at the forefront of battles with non-paying players such as piracy platforms or web and TV giants.

Armonia ultimately aims at expanding into a strong international community of societies fighting for the protection of authors’ rights and helping them to make a living from their creations. To that end, we have put in place strong licensing agreements with major DSPs to ensure maximum revenues for the authors.

RTP: How would you assess the current state of the music licensing system? Is the industry moving in fast enough to develop the capabilities needed to sustain a healthy music economy? Is if falling behind? Where are we on the learning curve?

AO: The traditional players from the music licensing system took a long time to fully embrace the new consumption habits in the digital realm and to adapt to them. It’s only very recently that we have seen technology initiatives emerge among those traditional players. However, transparency in royalty pay-outs remains a major challenge among all of those new privately-owned technology structures, whereas CMOs must comply with ever-stricter transparency guidelines.

What has been interesting lately, is how the traditional industry has begun to join forces to build common initiatives in the fields of tech and innovations: the ASCAP/BMI joint song database plan, the SACEM/PRS/ASCAP blockchain project, the R&D initiative of the Nordic music copyright societies ‘Polaris Future Lab’, ASCAP/PRS/STIM partnership with the Swedish startup Auddly… CMOs know they cannot move fast enough to adapt if they are on their own: cooperation and exchanges of expertise are keys.

Yet there is still work to be done and processes to be improved since the digital storm is far to be over. New models are emerging every year, regarding both financing structures and types of contents, that do not fit in the boxes of traditional licensing schemes. It is always about finding the right balance between what is fair for artists without asphyxiating the service: a startup still in its infancy today could be the Spotify of tomorrow, and overwhelming licensing fees or advanced payments could nip it in the bud and prevent from significant revenues in the future.

RTP: What are the main challenges the industry still needs to address with respect to licensing, and how effectively are they being addressed?

AO: The number one challenge in the licensing system today is the identification of works. Collective societies rely on metadata to identify works, but very often, the information available is not qualitative enough to properly match a work with its rights owners. Moreover, the international licensing system relies on two types of information: the sound recording data, associated with the International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) and the publishing data, associated with the International Standard Work Codes (ISWCs). Today, there is no industry-wide system in place to reconcile the two, and third-party tech providers often don’t have access to it.

Technologies like audio fingerprinting, metadata enrichment or blockchains have been developed to reduce, over time, the number of unidentified works. Still, thousands of new works are added every day to the thousands of music work already in databases within the publishing industry, making the task very complex.

Another very interesting challenge the music rights industry will have to tackle in the very near future is Artificial Intelligence in the many possible ways it could impact our organizations. How could machine learning change the composition of music? When an AI creates a piece of music, who owns the rights to it? And who is liable for copyright infringement in such event? These are questions the industry has to address today if it wants to remain relevant tomorrow.

Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey to Keynote RightsTech Summit

August 30, 2017By rightstech

In 2009 Jim McKelvey was a practitioner and teacher of the art of glassblowing and author of a leading textbook on the subject, The Art of Fire. Frustrated by his inability to complete a $2,000 sale of his glass faucets and fittings because he could not accept credit cards he approached his friend, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter.

From that collaboration, Square, Inc., was born, which revolutionized the world of payment processing by turning any smartphone and tablet into a credit card reader and cash register.

That nexus, between artistry and innovation, is the core of the RightsTech Revolution, and will be the focus of McKelvey’s keynote fireside chat at the RightsTech Summit in New York on September 27th.

In addition to Square, McKelvey is the co-founder of the Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis, and a partner in Cultivation Capital, an early-stage investment fund.

He also sits on the board of directors of Calpian Inc., which offers mobile money solutions through its Indian subsidiary MoneyOnMobile, and is an independent director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

His latest venture, LaunchCode, is a non-profit organization that aims to grow new talent and create pathways to on-the-job training and employment.

Jim will discuss his evolution from artist to entrepreneur, his strategies for building and growing companies, and the ongoing evolution of the Square Payments Platform.

For information on how to register for the summit click here.

Momentum Builds For Music Database, But Controversy May Follow

July 26, 2017By rightstech

The music industry has been discussing and debating for years the merits of creating a comprehensive, publicly accessible database of musical works and sound recordings and the ownership information attendant to each — something that does not currently exist. But various multi-stakeholder efforts to compile such a catalog have faltered amid disputes over cost, control, and access, most spectacularly the ill-fated Global Repertoire Database initiative spearheaded by a group of music publishers and performance rights organizations.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner

The need for such data, meanwhile, has only grown more acute, as the volume of new recordings being released each month as exploded and music streaming services churn through vast catalogs, leading to an eruption of disputes and litigation over the proper payment of royalties to rights owners.

Momentum seems to be building, however, behind renewed efforts to compile the universal look-up catalog, although controversy is already bubbling up around some of those efforts. Last week, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property Subcommittee introduced the Transparency in Music Licensing Ownership Act, which would instruct the U.S. Copyright Office to compile an open, comprehensive database linking metadata about sound recordings with metadata and ownership information about musical works so that users of sound recordings would be able to identify and locate the current rights owners of the musical works involved. The bill would also appropriate money to compile and maintain the database.

To encourage rights owners to register their works with Copyright Office for inclusion in the database the bill would also limit their ability to bring legal action against alleged infringers if the rights owner has not provided up-to-date information to the Copyright Office.

“Across the country, businesses and establishments play or perform music for the enjoyment of their patrons, but the process of ensuring they are legally able to do so, as well as those who hold the license to the music or recordings being played are fairly compensated, is convoluted and difficult,” Sensenbrenner said in a press release. “The Transparency in Music Licensing Ownership Act is a step forward in simplifying the process and helping business owners to identify copyright holders in one easy location to ensure they comply with licensing and payment requirements.”

How far Sensenbrenner’s bill will go in the current congress is an open question. Very little legislation in moving on Capitol Hill these days amid gridlock over health care reform and the multiple investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It’s also possible the effort could get dragged into the still unresolved controversy over the appointment of a new Register of Copyrights, a position sill unfilled since the previous Register, Maria Pallante was removed last year by the new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden.

But Sensenbrenner’s bill seems to have lit a fire under other music industry stakeholders who already make commercial use of elements of the data the bill would make public. On Wednesday, the two leading PROs in the U.S., ASCAP and BMI, announced plans to combine their respective catalogs of musical works into a single, unified database and to make it available to others in the industry.

“ASCAP and BMI are proactively and voluntarily moving the entire industry a step forward to more accurate, reliable and user-friendly data, ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews said in a press release. “We believe in a free market with more industry cooperation and alignment on data issues. Together, ASCAP and BMI have the most expertise in building and managing complex copyright ownership databases.”

Sensenbrenner immediately blasted the move, however, as an attempt to preempt his legislation.

“If BMI and ASCAP were serious about establishing a music database, not only would they have spoken to my office and other interested

Robert Kasunic, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Registration Policy and Practice, U.S. Copyright Office

Members of Congress about their plans, but they would have also included their fellow PROs in the initiative,” he said in a statement. “With their announcement today, they are grasping at straws; trying to maintain power over a failing process that only serves their interests, not those of the American consumer.”

The upcoming RightsTech Summit, which will be held September 27th in New York City, will tackle the daunting data challenges music industry and other media sectors face today as digital platforms strain legacy rights management and licensing systems, as well as the renewed efforts to create a comprehensive music rights database.

Executives from Rumblefish and the Harry Fox Agency, Music Reports, and other private companies making commercial use of the data targeted by Sensenbrenner’s bill will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of data sharing and the technological challenges associated with making it available.

The summit will also feature a one-on-one fireside chat with Robert Kasunic, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Registration Policy and Practice at the U.S. Copyright Office, who will address copyright reform efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere, including the Transparency in Music Licensing Ownership Act.

For information on registering for the RightsTech Summit, click here.