As you read this, we will just have finished making our case at the Copyright Tribunal where online and mobile royalty rates in the UK have been under considerable scrutiny.
We will probably have to wait until Spring 2007 for the Tribunal’s decision. Whatever the final declaration, it will undoubtedly have an impact on the way we license in this area; for better or worse. The Tribunal has been a huge but necessary diversion for us during 2006 and one of our major challenges for 2007 will be applying the template it will provide to our licensing opportunities.
'the existing market is migrating
towards UGC'
That coupled with the fact that the pace of change we have seen over the last couple of years is now a way of life. There is no turning back. The licensing challenges faced by rightsowners from file-sharing networks has now been joined by those of User Generated Content (UGC) sites. The genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. During 2006, MySpace and YouTube became the world’s fourth and fifth most popular English-language websites (behind Yahoo!, MSN and Google), the latter being feted as TIME magazine’s Invention of the Year.
And big business is piling in. MySpace now belongs to NewsCorp and YouTube to Google (see story on facing page) but everywhere you look, businesses are launching their own UGC sites. The ‘traditional’ broadcasters have been quick off the mark, with UGC sites launching from the BBC, Channel 4 and BSkyB. (That Sky should be labelled as a ‘traditional’ broadcaster is evidence itself of the pace of change.)
Not only are we seeing a myriad of new entrants, but the existing market is migrating towards UGC. There are weekly, if not daily, announcements about existing companies and business models changing to adopt and adapt to it. And that presents complex challenges for rightsholders and their collecting society licensing agents.
That’s before we even start to look at the newer games sites such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel where complex virtual exploitations are taking place.
We will need to engage fresh thinking sitting alongside any judgements coming from the Copyright Tribunal to ensure we license these new markets appropriately. We’re currently working with you in a number of consultation sessions to assess your needs and that work will continue apace in the early part of next year.
And we shouldn’t count out solutions coming from within the new sites themselves. One interesting thought is that sites such as Second Life would provide the opportunity to try out new licensing models and test their viability before launching them in the ‘real’ world. Although, of course, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to work out where real and virtual begin and end.