Category Music
New Proposed Legislation Sets Up Showdown Over Online U.S. Music Rights Database
An effort is brewing in Washington to get an authoritative online database of music rights information built for the United States. It started last week as a bill called the Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act. (It has neither a catchy acronym nor even a bill number at this time of writing, so we’ll just call […]
Proposed Settlement in Spotify Lawsuit Points the Way Towards Solving Music Industry Data Problems
One of the biggest unsolved problems in the music business today is the lack of authoritative mapping between music recordings and the compositions they embody. When music people talk about the industry’s “database problem,” this is a big part of it. In the past, the industry has managed to work around it in various ad […]
Spotify Acquires Blockchain Startup Mediachain
Spotify announced yesterday that it has acquired the blockchain startup Mediachain Labs for an undisclosed sum. For those watching the music/blockchain space, this is big news indeed. Here’s a passage from the whitepaper I recently published on blockchain technology for music: DSPs [digital music service providers] have become the “big boys” of the music industry, […]
In Music, DRM Is Back While Ownership Is Going Away
The RIAA’s annual revenue figures for recorded music are a goldmine of information about the state, health, and direction of the music industry. The 2016 figures that the RIAA published at the end of March generated a few common headlines in the trade and business press: Recorded music revenue in the United States is finally […]
New White Paper: Watermarking Technology and Blockchains in the Music Industry
A new white paper that that explores the combination of blockchain technology and digital audio watermarks for improving rights management and royalty processing in the music industry.
The Myth of DRM-Free Music, Revisited
The most widely-read article on this blog these days one that I wrote two years ago called The Myth of DRM-Free Music. So I thought I’d follow up on it. I wrote that piece as a reaction to the popular story — which was coursing around the book publishing industry at the time — that Apple […]
The Failure of Print and E-Book Bundling
How many times has this happened to you: you buy a print book, you start to read it, you go on a trip, you forget to take the book, you find the e-book version online, and you chafe at having to pay full price for another version of something you already have? The music industry […]
Sacem’s Partnership with IBM
IBM announced a deal with the French music rights collecting society Sacem last week to co-develop a new system called URights. The system is expected to launch by the end of this year, and the partnership will span ten years. The system will run on IBM’s cloud computing infrastructure and use IBM’s implementation of the […]
2017 Conference
I’m pleased to welcome the law firm of Davis Wright & Tremaine (DWT) as a Gold Sponsor for the Copyright and Technology 2017 conference. DWT partner Lance Koonce is one of the leaders of the firm’s Blockchain Initiative and has been especially active in blockchain applications for media and the arts. (In fact, I first met […]
Facebook Faces Copyright Issues Amid Video Explosion
It’s fairly well established by now — thanks to court decisions like Viacom v. YouTube and UMG v. Veoh — that online service operators have no legal duty to proactively police their services for potential copyright infringement. But that doesn’t mean that some services don’t do it anyway. The biggest example is Google’s Content ID system for YouTube, […]
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