In evaluating the rhetoric and proposals advanced by the PROs, and music publishers, it is important to be mindful of the distinction between a “fair market” and a “free market”. The copyright owners use these terms interchangeably, yet these terms are not synonymous. At the most basic level, “free market” rates are the rates that a seller would obtain in an idealized market, free from any government intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies, or regulation.
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SIA AKKA/LAA (SIA “Autortiesību un komunicēšanās konsultāciju aģentūra/Latvijas Autoru apvienība” –Copyright and Communication Consulting Agency ltd./Latvian Authors Association) is a non-profit organisation founded in Riga by a separate non-profit organisation, the Latvian Authors Association, whose members are various Latvian artists.
Comments closedFormer CEO of Russian authors’ society, Sergey Fedotov, has been found guilty for the fraud. 19th of September Russian court in Moscow has announced the verdict. One and half year imprisonment according to the sentence.
Comments closedAs authors and performers tend to be in a weaker contractual position when they grant licences or transfer their rights, they need information, to assess the continued economic value of their rights, compared to the remuneration received for their licence or transfer, but they often face a lack of transparency. Therefore, the sharing of adequate information by their contractual counterparts or their successors in title is important for the transparency and balance in the system that governs the remuneration of authors and performers.
Comments closedUnder Russian copyright law, and not only under Russian law, the owner of copyright, the author, publisher has a property right to receive remuneration for exploitation of its rights in work. Economical rights of creators must be protected under national laws of different countries, including Russia, and under international law. But Russian government decided to simplify the law concerning mandatory licensing of public performance right and provided three-year term for economical rights of copyright owners.
Comments closedMandatory 100-percent licensing of jointly owned works would contravene the basic rule adopted in the 1976 Act that ownership of copyright, and the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, are divisible without limitation. The Act provides that a copyright may be transferred to another person “in whole or in part,” and that exclusive rights, “including any subdivision of any of the rights,” may be transferred and owned separately. Thus, as one court has described it, a copyright may be “chopped up and owned separately, and each separate owner of a subdivided exclusive right may sue to enforce that owned portion of an exclusive right, no matter how small.”
Comments closedTraditionally, in areas where there are many creators and users of copyrighted works, collective licensing bodies or collective management organisations (“CMOs”) have managed the copyrighted works for the creators. This is because it is impractical for a creator to negotiate and license the use of his or her works to numerous users individually.
Comments closedAmong the options proposed in consultation paper for reform to the copyright board of Canada it could be outlined some of them with regard to collective rights management and tariff setting procedure, including the practice of individual agreements or the analogue of interim license in USA.
Comments closedNAB members are both creators and users of copyrighted works and, as such, recognize the important need to balance the rights of copyright owners against the public interest. The blanket licensing of performance rights is inherently anti-competitive because the very nature of the PRO’s blanket license involves the fixing of a single price for all music, irrespective of which songs are actually used.
Comments closedThe Office believes that an interpretation of the consent decrees that would require these PROs to engage in 100-percent licensing presents a host of legal and policy concerns. Such an approach would seemingly vitiate important principles of copyright law, interfere with creative collaborations among songwriters, negate private contracts, and impermissibly expand the reach of the consent decrees. It could also severely undermine the efficacy of ASCAP and BMI, which today are able to grant blanket licenses covering the vast majority of performances of musical works – a practice that is considered highly efficient by copyright owners and users alike.
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