Digital Music Royalty Dispute Settled

A settlement of a long-running dispute being handled by the Copyright Royalty Board (the CRB) at the Library of Congress was announced this week, and if the proposed agreement is accepted, it stands to clear up substantial questions about royalty rates for digital music licenses.  The Recording Industry Association of America, the Digital Media Association, and the National Music Publishers' Association came together and proposed a royalty rate framework that addresses five different models for delivering digital music content:

1.   Mixed service bundles
2.   Paid locker services
3.   Purchased content lockers 
4.    “Limited offerings”
5.    Music bundles 

It is not exactly clear if all of these services are actually available in the market right now, but the intent of the parties is to be out in front of future royalty issues.  Once the agreement is made available it should be easier to match the new royalty categories to actual services, and one has to believe that the trade association members that participated in construction of the agreement had specific services in mind, whether they exist now or will emerge in the future.  The proposed agreement will cover 2013-2017.

attention venues!

  The New York Times has a great (and comprehensive) piece about the folks that walk the beat and get bars and other establishments to sign on with the performance rights organizations (ASCAP and BMI). 

Check it out HERE.

This article is really worth the read.  We get a lot of calls from clients that get visited by the performance rights organizations, and the whole "of course people should pay for music, just not us" conversation inevitably ensues. 

Is the system broken?

piracy's new (old) frontier: sheet music

Jason Robert Brown has an interesting perspective on the illegal copying/distribution of sheet music via the internet.  It's not novel, actually: he's an artist that thinks he should be paid for his creative work product.  The law agrees, but sheet music is ending up with the rest of the world's creative content: exposed and vulnerable to copy on the internet.

documentary film and fair use

The questions regarding what constitutes "fair use" never seem to get answered with certainty, and that is consistent with the evolutionary nature of copyright law.  The use of music owned by Phil Spector in a film about the man is today's entry in the evolutionary cycle.  There's a good piece in this morning's NYTimes HERE.  

open source everything?

A little over a year after Nina Paley put out "Sita Sings the Blues" with some fanfare based on her open culture distribution plan, the conversation about radical changes to the U.S. copyright regime are still underway--and if anything, are heating up.

 

As almost every facet of the entertainment industry continues to scramble to change business models and plans, there seems to be little patience to actually confront the open culture movement and talk about how to reach the common ground between concepts of artistic freedom, intellectual property protection and profitability. The ABA is gently considering it in a short piece about "Sita..." HERE.

At a panel discussion last week I mentioned the fact that I'm urging independent filmmaker clients to explore alternative financing for their projects (e.g. Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, etc.) as well as ways to recoup while embracing new distribution models.  A fellow attorney in the audience asked me if any of these clients were making money on "alternative" and "new" models, and I had to respond that the jury is still out.  But by no means is the case closed, and that's enough to continue encouraging innovation.

So should we crack open the copyright framework and adopt an open culture and take some of the barriers to entry down for filmakers/authors/musicians?  Is it too slippery a slope?