Toward Global Rights

Music is a complex commodity bundled with many rights. As intellectual property, it requires licenses to transact legally. But in today’s marketplace, clearances from owners or intermediaries can be difficult to track both nationally and internationally. Often, many parties are involved before permission can be granted for a single trade. In effect, it may be more practical to license a collection of songs rather than a single song, biasing usage against the non-commercial and cultural repertoire of lesser known artists and works. As a result, the diffusion of musical production and the livelihood of music creators, two tenets of international copyright law, are coming under threat.

The problem for buyers and sellers of music has been compounded since the new millennium. Music is bought and sold in TVs, computers, smart phones, and satellite radio. There are more playback devices and distribution channels, so the number of transactions is growing exponentially. More trade, however, does not mean a higher returned value because the typical tradable item before the millennium was the album, and it returned ten times the worth that a single song does presently.  Musical purchases today, in short, are dominated by myriad low- priced transactions.

The perception is that the rights’ shell of music is now hindering business more than ever, not just by adding friction in the music exchange but also by preventing trade. As the fortunes of the global recorded music market have declined catastrophically since the new millennium, with the business only grossing half the value that it did back then, a new sense of urgency is being felt both by music stakeholders and governments.

Regarding stakeholders: When music users are not getting access to creative content because of the logistical difficulties that music intermediaries, including online music distributors, have clearing music rights, the market takes a hit.  As for governments: The State tends to become involved where copyright industries are deemed significant and/or music is thought of as a cultural good worth protecting. Another issue here is the migration of music into the ‘public domain’. The transition can never be seamless unless there is clarity and tractability about ownership rights. The end of the commercial exploitation of a musical piece, of course, is never really accepted gladly by the interested party.

A New Series

The Music Business Journal will start its first ever article series on a multinational effort to build a better infrastructure to trade music.  The object is to draw attention regularly in future issues to a new momentum behind international song registries and one-stop initiatives for global rights’ clearances. As we write, a new architecture for the music trade is being attempted under existing intellectual property laws. (Because of this, the Journal will concentrate its efforts on the creation of such registries and continue to cover general legal developments elsewhere in the publication.)

We will look at all the parties involved, the agreements and compromises that will be necessary to carry these novel ideas to fruition, and the implications of these registries for the future of music. It took many years to get nation states to agree to submit their economic data to the League of Nations, and for the latter to begin compiling national income statistics. Similarly, sellers and owners of music copyrights, as well as public libraries and other publicly owned music repositories, have to come to the negotiating table willingly. The drama is likely to last.

Yet the development of mechanisms for better rights’ documentation, data-collection, and rights’ clearances is arguably as urgent today as when the onslaught of online music challenged the recorded industry after 2001.  Inaction, of course, has a steep price in an economy in crisis, and global efforts to build song registries have derived impetus from the Great Recession. Naturally, the music market has a better chance to discover new trades and reduce transaction costs if it centralizes and lays bare its arcane permit strictures.

IMR, GDR, and CISAC

The Journal has picked up increased coverage on the subject, and done its part¹.

The United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is presently focusing on developing an international intellectual property system and has made the case for an International Music Registry (IMR) in the past year. Specialists, academics, and stakeholders have been convened for special forums, for instance at the World Copyright Summit in Brussels in June, throughout October and November in Geneva, and at a Harvard-Berklee Rethink Music workshop in Boston in November.

Earlier, in 2008, the European Competition Commissioner of the EU established a working group which included representatives from Amazon, Universal Music, EMI, iTunes, Nokia, and three collection societies: PRS (United Kingdom), SACEM (France), and STIM (Sweden). The aim was to develop a Global Repertoire Database (GRD) that would stand as the reliable central database for multi-territorial licensing².

Both groups are of course weary of competing with each other. WIPO has made it clear that IMR and GRD should cooperate to make the most efficient international licensing database possible, while, early in 2011, at a joint IMR-GRD meeting, the GRD Chair noted that the GRD could connect to the system that IMR developed³.

At the same time, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), an umbrella organization for mostly, but not exclusively, performing rights’ societies, joined the GRD in March 2011. CISAC developed the International Standard Musical Work Code (‘ISWC’), which identifies musical works from information procured by the rights-holders⁴.  Its expertise in copyright data management is thus political as well as technical.

Our Coverage

Clearly, the trade of music is recognizing that it can benefit from a new and more federated approach. For more in-depth coverage, the MBJ intends to publish, in the months ahead, individual pieces on (i) the potential for a synergy between IMR and GRD, (ii) the technological solutions being discussed, (iii) possible funding mechanisms for a global register or registries, (iv) the politics of stakeholders and the role of government, (v) the management and control of global song databases, and (vi) the unavoidable legal challenges of antitrust concerns, formalities, orphan works, and conflicting claims.

In our next issue, we will be reporting from MIDEM, at Cannes, France.  There, late in January, IMR and GRD representatives will engage in a debate with participants from around the globe. The expectation is that they will release their own independent study shortly after.

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¹ See Luiz Augusto Buff, “WIPO Tallies Song Credits Worldwide”, The Music Business Journal, Oct. 2011, 10; and, same author, “The G8 and Copyright”, MBJ, Aug. 2011, 4 (also at www.thembj.org).

² Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Rethinking Music: The Challenges of Creating and Maintaining a Music Rights Registry, Working Draft, Nov. 2011, 3.

³ Ibid., 4.

⁴ Ibid., 5.

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by Peter Alhadeff, Zosia Boczanowski, Luiz Augusto Buff, and Aaron Gottlieb

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