Brussels, 11/07/2012 (Agence Europe) - Modernising and improving the way that 250 European copyright collecting societies for musical works and creating a true single market for online music while facilitating the granting of multi-territorial licences - this is what Commissioner for the Internal Market Michel Barnier proposed on 11 July in a draft directive on the collective management of copyright and the award of multi-territorial licences for rights on musical works (regarding their online use).
The Commission intends with this draft both to strengthen the governance of rights management societies, which generate revenues of about €6 billion per year, and especially enable artists or rightholders to have their rights and payment fully respected. The Commission also wants to enable online music users to have access to more legal offers, with services like Itunes or Spotify, Barnier said on Wednesday morning, as there are currently 27 licences available for selling music online throughout the EU.
The Commission proposal therefore plans to remedy this weakness and help collecting societies by setting them clear obligations, and to move fully into the digital era, the commissioner said. The proposal will also enable “cultural diversity” to be strengthened, giving artists/national creators the chance to become known more easily in other member states, and no longer confining musical repertoires to a particular country, even favouring the aggregation of repertoires.
The proposal thus provides for collecting societies, which want to become involved in the granting of multi-territorial licences, to conform to a series of rules on governance and transparency. For example, a society will have to pay what it owes a creator or rightholder within a period of 12 months maximum, Barnier said. The Commission points out in a press release that certain practices must be changed, as proved not only by recent cases in which a poor investment policy has swallowed up part of the payments received for rightholders, and also the long delays observed in paying rightholders.
The collecting societies will thus have to respect standards on internal organisation, governance, financial management and transparency. The proposal will strengthen their obligations to inform and the control of their activities by rightholders. In practice, the Commission explains that rightholders will be able to be involved directly in the management of their rights and be remunerated more quickly. They would legally have the right to choose the most efficient collecting society with regard to their objectives and they would have this right no matter in which country they are based, so that a French rightholder would very well be able to choose a German society, for example.
In terms of the way societies work, they will be obliged to have a better management of the repertoires, to be totally transparent on the flows of their finances generated by rights and will have to publish an annual transparency report. The member states will for their part be called to have mechanisms to resolve disputes between these societies and rightholders, the Commission goes on to say. These obligations would thus strengthen the “confidence in their activities”.
With regard to the award of multi-territorial copyright licences, the candidate societies will also have to prove their technical ability and that they are sufficiently able to assure the efficient execution of this duty. The societies will also have to be clear on the repertory given, control of its use, invoicing systems, rights collection and the distribution of royalties to creators. (IL/transl.fl)