Music - Copyright or Copy-wrong

Music - Copyright or Copy-wrong

Introduction

The music headlines have been dominated by concerns over music piracy and, in particular internet piracy, the long-awaited merger of the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) and the Performing Right Society (PRS) to form the Music Alliance, the overhaul of the PRS's obsolete methods of income distribution and various disputes over Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) and PRS licence fees (Hugenholtz, 2000). Notable amongst major decisions of the Copyright Tribunal were those which dealt with the protracted disputes between the PRS and British Sky Broadcasting ('BSkyB) and the PRS and British Airways PLC (BA). Both cases highlighted the vagaries of audience research and the complexity of the calculations of tariffs for airline operators and satellite broadcasters. The BA case brought to the attention of the Tribunal the different bases of tariff calculation for collecting societies in other countries and the difficulties in comparing these to the UK system. The PRS's system of licensing also came under scrutiny in the Direct Line case, which took a look at the PRS's Articles of Association dealing with the assignment of members' film synchronization rights.

On the international front, there has been much talk of the proposed Common Information System (CIS) to be shared by authors' collecting societies worldwide (Freegard and Black, 1997). This overdue and ambitious proposal, which aims to reduce costs and speed up the delivery of royalties to society members through the digital identification of copyright works and through the digital transmission of data between collecting societies, has been on the drawing board since 1994. The lack of progress to date prompted the Confédération Internationale des Sociétés des Auteurs et Compositeurs (CISAC) to appoint a steering committee of ten societies, including the Music Alliance, to oversee the implementation of CIS. The Music Alliance together with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) (Hugenholtz, 2000), Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) and BUMA and STEMRA, which administer copyrights in the Netherlands, have also begun a separate feasibility study into developing a joint system for back-office tasks. Despite attempts to allay the other collecting societies' fears, there are those within the industry who anticipate that such a move could undermine and jeopardize the future viability of CIS.

Finally, we have been entertained with the usual diet of cases dealing with management, band member, and copyright ownership disputes, which have provided us (courtesy of the insatiable tabloid press) with a glimpse into the lives and egos of the rich and famous, and their lawyers.

Music on the Internet

The growth of illegal music on the Internet gave rise to real and growing concerns within the industry throughout 1997 and into 1998. (Mayer, 1998) The UK record industry trade association, the BPI, commenced a programme of monitoring and bringing enforcement action against those committing internet piracy, particularly by way of MP3 files. MP3 is an audio compression technology, part of the family of standards set by the Motion Pictures Expert Group, which enables sound files to be compressed to a ...