With digital shrinking the world around us every day, we need to work ever closer with our affiliated societies overseas; and that means forging stronger partnerships in common areas. You’ll already have read about our partnership with GEMA in Germany that sees us administering the EMI music publishing catalogue together for online and mobile. In this issue of M, you’ll read about our new partnership with Swedish society, STIM. This partnership will see us working together to build a new service centre for music rights administration. Both partnerships are significant developments for collecting societies and mark the first stages of transformation of the collecting society map of Europe.
collecting society transformation has begun
Our partnership with STIM is driven by a shared desire to create significant operational and cost efficiencies for our respective members. We can achieve this quicker by working together and we can share the cost of that development.
To begin with, we’ll create a new copyright database that will improve data quality and our respective processing capability. Then we’ll assess what other benefits members could see from a shared service centre.
The intention would be to offer any shared service centre facilities to other collecting societies on a commercial basis. It makes little sense to us any more that every collecting society in the world should carry the cost of running its own database against which it operates a processing and matching operation. If this could all be done by a central ‘clearing house’ then the individual societies could concentrate on bringing in more revenue from their licensing efforts and on improving the level of service they offer to their members.
Online licensing in the UK and the US
As M goes to press, we are still waiting for a decision from the UK Copyright Tribunal in the case brought against our online royalty rate. It is two years since our rate was referred to the Tribunal. An encouraging new report from the DTI suggests reform of the Tribunal to speed the decision making process and reduce the expense of a lengthy legal process such as this. We look forward to working alongside Government to implement these recommendations.
On the other side of the Atlantic, one of our affiliated societies in the US, ASCAP, waits with baited breath for the start of a court case this Autumn which will determine the future of their online royalty rate. The case has been brought against ASCAP by a number of DSPs including AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! - the same parties we have been facing in the UK.
This will be a significant case for rightsholders since the judge has decided in a pre-trial hearing that there is no public performance involved in a download. This could seriously affect PRS members’ earnings from the US.
Could such a decision be taken in the UK? Is our performing right under threat?
In the UK we have operated a Joint Online Licence since 2002 - and music users have accepted it - which clearly defines that all forms of online exploitation include both a performing and a mechanical right.
The law in the UK (and Europe) supports our licensing. There are two clear and separate restricted acts defined in our law; the act of public performance which covers performances in front of live audiences and the restricted act of communication to the public (which includes broadcasting and any other transmission).
These distinctions aren’t present in US law which has just one definition of ‘perform’. It is in the specific terms of this definition that the US judge has initially taken the view that music must be audible simultaneously with its transmission in order for a performance to be said to have taken place.
We will do all we can to support our affiliate ASCAP in the forthcoming case to achieve what they can for copyright and for their members’ and your earnings.
Steve Porter is Chief Executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance