Category Rights Licensing
Could Lawsuit Settlements Be the Best Way to Solve Rights Data Problems?
Copyright owners have long been at odds with tech companies and service providers over copyright-related issues. We’ve seen various different attempts to solve these problems across industries since the start of the “copyright wars” in the late 1990s, enough to have some idea of what works and what doesn’t. In rough terms, there are four types […]
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 […]
W3C Permissions and Obligations Working Group Solicits Feedback on Specifications
The World Wide Web Consortium Permissions and Obligations Expression (W3C POE) Working Group is soliciting feedback on draft specifications. Renato Iannella, co-chair of the W3C POE WG and inventor of the ODRL rights language on which it’s based, asked me to pass along this statement: The W3C Permissions and Obligations Expression (POE) Working Group are delighted […]
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 […]
Conference on Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works at PTO
The U.S. Commerce Department’s Internet Policy Task Force will be holding a conference on Friday December 9, Public Meeting on Developing the Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works. The event will take place at the Madison Auditorium, Patent and Trademark Office, Alexandria, VA. The objective of this event will be to see what role government can play in areas […]
Core Rights and SOCAN Building Blockchain-Based System for Venue Music Licensing
Amid all the talk, hype, and activity around blockchain solutions for music, questions arise about whether large existing entities in the digital music value chain will adopt the technology, and if so, how. These fall roughly into four buckets: record labels, music publishers, royalty collecting societies, and DSPs (consumer music distributors such as Apple, Spotify, and Pandora). One […]
Guest Post: Blockchains Won’t Change the Music Industry. Only Artists Can.
It seems that every day there is a new article or new platform claiming the blockchain will revolutionize the music industry. There are at least 20 companies developing ways to write write music metadata into the blockchain. The Open Music Initiative has brought together over 120 companies trying to find new solutions to the current […]
The Mysterious Case of the Fake Beatles Cover
Several big-name recording artists have been “digital holdouts” who have refused to license their material for distribution through interactive streaming music services like Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Rhapsody, and so on. One by one, most of them eventually gave in and joined the crowd: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Kid Rock, Def Leppard, […]
E-Books: Subscription Services vs. Libraries
Business model flexibility with digital content leads to a blur between the public good and private enterprise.
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