“All deep things are song”, said Thomas Carlyle. “It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!”
“Music is what feelings sound like”, said an unknown author.
“If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music”, said Sydney Smith. “It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.”
All wrong. Especially Sydney Smith. Because these days, music is neither cheap, nor unpunished rapture.
It’s a hard-core corporate commodity to be sold for maximum profit.
And punishment is an absolutely integral part of it.
While you hold that thought, a quote more appropriate to the 21st digital century comes from Francis Gurry, director general of WIPO, .
It’s on the creation of the
International Music Registry which, “would need to be a global public asset, based on voluntary participation and available to all as a basis for operating or building business models for the management or exploitation of rights”, he says.
Ahhhhhhh. A statement sufficient to warm the cold, black hearts of the people behind the dying Big 4 labels, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian).
It’s their unbridled avarice and lust for domination and control which makes such a registry necessary.
“The project is a collaboration of the worldwide music sector, facilitated by WIPO, aimed at facilitating licensing in the digital environment by providing easier access to reliable information about musical works and sound recordings”, says the web site, going on >>>
The amazing growth and development of the Internet as the delivery mechanism for music over the last decade has challenged the music rights management architecture, which was not designed to facilitate use of music in the digital world.
We need to make it faster, easier, and simpler for those who want to use music for legal services to find who owns what rights in music – and not just in the developed world, but throughout the world.
What all this points to is the need to create an international system that ‘ties together’ all the different rights-management systems in use in different countries. An accurate, authoritative, registry of information about musical works, sound recordings and music videos is a fundamental, essential public good that supports a healthy ecosystem for digital music.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes balanced international intellectual property (IP) protection as a means of rewarding creativity, stimulating innovation, and contributing to economic development and access to knowledge in the public interest. As an immediate priority, WIPO is facilitating a platform for exchange among the worldwide music sector to look at the challenges facing music in the digital environment. The International Music Registry project is focussed on ensuring that such a registry collaborates with existing efforts around the world to improve access to music rights information. The result will lead to a more transparent, inclusive architecture that operates for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Below are items number 1 and 2 in the FAQ >>>
What is the nature of the problem the dialogue is looking at?
It is widely understood that the way all rights in music are presently managed was designed for territory-by-territory exploitation of physical products and not for the digital environment, where services need to ‘look global’ and allow consumers from multiple countries to easily access as large a collection of copyrighted materials as possible. The manual licensing of music country-by-country for the same content each time though generally from different rightsholders creates massive inefficiencies and a high cost of acquiring legal licenses to commercialize music that is multiplied for every territory that a service wishes to operate in. It has other problems, amongst them:
- It requires each provider to expensively develop complex rights-management systems through custom-developed software to interact with the different rights-management systems of rightsholders in each country. This reduces the flexibility providers have in pricing their services to consumers and also reduces the amount that service providers can offer in licensing revenue.
- A fragmented availability of works, where the same service ends up providing different works and performances from one country to another, with no apparent way for the users to acquire legal access to all the material – even though they can often see it is available to someone, just not to them.
- The manual nature of licensing (and the costs of licensing this way) guarantees that many works which do not have a clear likelihood of commercial success are largely, or entirely, unavailable legally for the consumer – while the nature of the Internet makes global availability of these works from unlicensed services easy – and creates an incentive for the unscrupulous to meet the legally-unmet demand.
- The complexity and cost of the licensing process, due to the large number of entities a service provider must acquire the various rights from, creates a significant barrier to entry for the development of innovative content services.
The worry across the industry is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to ‘compete with free’ and persuade consumers used to easy and convenient access to music from non-legal sites to start paying for it – and that the longer this situation continues the more difficult ‘retraining’ especially younger music lovers to use paid services will become.
What all this points to is the need to create an international system that ‘ties together’ all the different rights-management systems in use in different countries through electronic interfaces, making it much easier and cheaper for services to gain legal access to rights and ultimately to license them.
The first step – getting the stakeholders together to discuss first principles
In order to create such a system, the organizing committee of this dialogue is inviting a key group of stakeholders from music to get together to discuss at a high level:
The proposition that an international registry of rights is an essential prerequisite to healthy, multi-territory licensing of music in the digital world.
What the high-level principles underpinning such a registry would be
What institution could be the ‘home’ and operator of such a system which would be trusted by both licensors, licensees, and governments to administer such a valuable common international resource
How to move forward with the next steps
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has offered to host this meeting and provide technical services to it, as well as make its experts available to provide information requested by the dialogue as its members may require.
Hear the merry tinkle of cash registers ringing up Big 4 profits.
The new sound of music.
Where do we, the people come into it?
We don’t.
