EU Proposes System for Online Music

The European Commission proposed a single Europe-wide copyright and licensing system for online music on Thursday, aimed at boosting the European Union’s music business.

EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said European online services had to be improved to make copyrights cheaper for artists to obtain.

“We have to improve the licensing of music copyright on the Internet,” McCreevy said, adding that such a system would ensure “Europe’s creative community will get the lion’s share in revenues achieved online.”

EU Press release: Music copyright: Commission proposes reform on Internet licensing; the report Copyright and Neighbouring Rights; see also Management of Copyright and Related Rights with direct links to Study on a community initiative on the cross-border collective management of copyright and Copyright at the Crossroads?

From the study executive summary:

This Study examines the present structures for cross-border collective management of

copyright for the provision of online music services. It concludes that the absence of EU-wide copyright licences for online content services makes it difficult for these music services to take off. Improving cross-border licensing for music services requires the creation of entirely new structures for cross-border collective management of copyright.

In order to improve cross-border management of copyright, this Study considers three options: (1) Do nothing (Option 1); (2) Suggest ways in which cross-border cooperation between national collecting societies in the 25 Member States can be improved (Option 2); or (3) Give right-holders the choice to authorise a collecting society of their choice to manage their works across the entire EU (Option 3).

The Study concludes that Option 3 offers the most effective model for cross-border management. With respect to cross-border licensing, allowing right-holders to choose a collecting society outside their national territories for the EU-wide licensing of the use made of his works, creates a competitive environment for cross-border management of copyright and considerably enhances right-holders’ earning potential. With respect to cross-border distribution of royalties, the right-holders freedom to choose any collecting society in the EU, will be a powerful incentive for these societies to provide optimal services to all its rightholders, irrespective of their location - thereby enhancing cross-border royalty payments.

The Study therefore proposes a series of principles that Member States would have to adhere to in order not to stifle the emergence of Option 3 as a competitive model for the cross-border management of copyright works.

From the Washington Post: The Inescapable Digital Me [pdf]

In the future no one will ever die. This is what a friend once told me. He said that as a person aged — maybe when he got very old — the contents of his brain would be downloaded onto a computer disk and his decrepit body would be discarded (or maybe recycled — who knows?). Then everything on the disk, which is to say our mind, our brain, our personality with all its quirks and disorders, would be transferred to a new, synthetic body, which would — if servicing was done on schedule — last approximately forever. I am here to say part of this has already happened to me.

[...] This is more or less getting to be a routine occurrence. I am forever coming across columns I’ve totally forgotten writing and I now, routinely, have to check to see if I have already staked out a position on some matter of importance — and what, exactly, it may be. For this, there is The Post’s own database, not to mention LexisNexis and Google and various competitors. These are where my life is catalogued. This is where I can retrieve my memory. I am digitized, therefore I am.

Obviously, this is a good thing. Less obviously, maybe, this is a bad thing. A man is entitled to his own view of himself. He is entitled to be who he says he is. He is the sum product of a gazillion memories, some of them shaved a bit, some of them totally renovated, some of them discarded and forgotten and replaced by dint of imagination and the urgent need to deny. Anyone who has led a full life needs denial. It is the Novocaine of life.

But now I am denied denial. [...]

[...] I am imprisoned by the truth, a record of what I wrote and the public’s silly insistence on consistency — a life sentence without hope of parole. For me, the future is the present. It’s not that I cannot die. It’s rather that I cannot lie.

• A brief look at some ClearPlay “cleaned-up” films: Rated S (For Scrubbed)

• Peter Jackson’s complaint against New Line Cinema over movie accounting and compensation: The Lawsuit of the Rings — Slate’s reaction to the NYTimes’ article: Lord of the Pigs?;

  The New York Times violates its code to cheap-shot director Peter Jackson.

• Advertising at the movies: Advertisers Pour More Money Into the Big Screen

• Advertising in the movies: Product Placement for the Whole Family

A look at the evolution of meaning, and the perception of performance preservation technologies: For the Record

When an album sells a half-million copies, the Recording Industry Association of America calls it a Gold Record. But these days, the framed award that hangs on the producer’s wall is a gold-tinted CD, not the gold-painted LP of years past.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences doesn’t care about the size of the disc when awarding the Grammy for Record of the Year. ”No matter how it’s packaged or distributed, from our standpoint, it’s all a recorded piece,” says Ron Roecker, the academy’s vice president for communications.

Ken Schlager, co-executive editor at Billboard, said the magazine’s definition of “record” encompasses both singles and albums. “Our specific style rules dictate that ‘record’ is an overarching term for any recording.”

Leave it to lawyers to create an expansive contractual meaning of “record” that includes formats that don’t even exist yet. Donald Passman, a music attorney and the author of “All You Need to Know About the Music Business,” says that the language varies slightly by company but that his definition is “every form of reproduction, transmission or communication (whether now known or unknown), embodying sound alone, or sound accompanied by visual images, manufactured, distributed, transmitted or communicated, directly or indirectly, for home use, business use, school use, personal use, jukebox use or use in means of transportation.”

While ”record” has remained popular within the industry, even as its form has morphed from 78 to 45 to LP to cassette to CD, much of the general public thinks records went out with record players (turntables).

(Sorry — I’m sure this is old news, but I’m catching up)

The Imps of File Sharing May Lose in Court, but They Are Winning in the Marketplace

Despite the music industry’s legal victories against file sharing, Ms. Hilary Rosen wrote, the strategy has not earned the industry any more control over a marketplace forever changed by digital technology - “no matter how many times it was hoped it would.”

Among Internet technorati, her words brought groans of incredulity. “Why didn’t she ever say any of this when she was actually in a position to make a difference?” wrote Michael Masnick, president and chief scribe at Techdirt.com, the blog connected to his technology consulting and corporate intelligence firm. “Instead, she walked the industry down deeper into a hole that is becoming increasingly difficult for them to climb out of.”

Even the most ardent supporters of Big Entertainment concede that, in the long run, copyright holders are no match for the ability of file-sharing technology to adapt, mutate, evolve and expand. In fairness to Ms. Rosen, it is a stark reality she noted early on.

“As a practical matter going forward,” she told Salon.com in early 2000, “lawsuits get a lot of headlines and they raise a lot of passion - I understand that. But ultimately the future of music on the Internet is not going to be about legalities and litigation, it’s going to be about how are we bringing music to fans.”

Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s about how fans are demanding that music be brought to them.

[...] The problem, [Big Champagne's] Mr. [Eric] Garland said, is that even law-abiding citizens now expect to be able to exchange content freely on the Internet. “It really may one day have to become a utility,” he said, “like water from a tap.” [ed: see The Future of Music]

So where does that leave the entertainment industry’s victory in the Supreme Court last week? “While I think it has legal value,” Ms. Rosen said, “it will be meaningless.”

A surprising little story that, despite its content, never employs the rhetoric of theft to describe what, in other contexts, would have been decried as a threat to creative work — a cultural difference, or something else?: With Covers, Publishers Take More Than Page From Rivals

Sometimes the photographs on book covers are not just similar, but exact duplicates. Rather than pay photographers’ day rates, most book designers turn to stock-photography agencies. Top agencies charge $1,200 to $1,500 a photograph, and twice that for exclusive rights, a premium publishers are loath to pay.

That’s where the trouble starts.

[...] Mary Schuck, senior art director at Harper Perennial, which published the first title, learned of the latter only recently, when directed to it on the Internet. “Oh, wow,” Ms. Schuck said. “They used the same photo. It’s just a huge mistake for this publisher to have done this.”

At that other publisher, Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley, the look-alike cover also came as news.

“It’s in all our best interests to make sure that image isn’t already being used in the same medium,” Jean Morley, Wiley’s vice president of creative services, said in an e-mail message. “When our designers use stock art, they routinely ask if the image is being used for other purposes, and most stock houses will volunteer that information.”

[...] In any case, neither publisher has any recourse against the agency, as neither paid for exclusivity.