How many licenses for one song do you need?
Copyright Office, EFF wrestle with Kafkaesque royalty issue
If you’ve followed the travails of the digital music market, even casually, you’ve probably picked up at least a passing sense that the whole process of licensing music copyrights can be… complicated. But you probably thought that, like many jobs, it’s all quite routine if that’s what you do for a living. Sadly, it’s not, as illustrated by an ongoing, seven-year bureaucratic proceeding of the kind that might seem familiar to Kafka.
The Copyright Office has been trying since 2001 to sort out issues surrounding the compulsory licensing of music. “What issues are those,” you ask, “and how could they possibly take seven years to sort out?” That’s a good question.
The issues involved with this deceptively simple process are legion: if your store streams on-demand songs, do you need a performance license or a reproduction license? Do the copies made in RAM on the server side count as “copies” in the sense that they need to be licensed? What about RAM copies on the client side? Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Relevant lectures: 2. ISSUES AND CONTEXTS, 8. CLASSIFICATION, 27. MULTIMEDIA IR
Kentaro Suzuki Said,
September 7, 2008 @ 5:59 pm
I’m interested in issues of copy rights. Therefore, this article concerns me.
As this article mentioned, a piece of musics in CD is related to a lot of copy rights such as a composer’s , an arranger’s , a CD publisher’s, a lyricist’s, a singer’s and a musician’s, et al. Moreover, a TV program is a more complex embodiment because it has not only rights related to musics but also an actor and actress’s rights, a director’s rights, a movie’s rights and so on. This complexity in processing related copy rights is one of the bottlenecks when someone would like to distribute TV programs over the Internet, especially in case of the past TV programs that are difficult to find and take permission from those who have its copyrights.
I heard the news about an experiment of a contents’ rights clearance system to distribute TV programs over the Internet, and some general meta data system to exchange metadata that each content’s holder defines was proposed in Japan 3 years ago. Perhaps, it is related to this topic.