Plans to overhaul the European Union’s complex rules on collective licensing for online music will be revealed today (Oct. 7) by the European Commission.
The plan was drafted by the services of EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy. McCreevy is expected to unveil the main lines of his project at the Creative Economy Conference held today in London.
The Commission should confirm a plan that gives right-holders and commercial users of copyright-protected material a choice of their preferred means of licensing. It aims to create a system ensuring musical rights can be cleared efficiently on an EU-wide basis so that the European online market can catch up with that in the U.S.
The rules are set to apply only to services provided on the Internet, such as simulcasting, webcasting, streaming, downloading or an online ‘on-demand’ service and music services provided to mobile telephones.
The new rules will say different online services might require different forms of EU-wide licensing policies. They will propose scrapping territorial restrictions and customer allocation provisions in existing licensing contracts, while leaving right-holders who do not want to make use of those contracts the possibility to tender their repertoire for EU-wide direct licensing.
The plan is in the form of a “Commission recommendation,” one of the weakest forms of EU rule-making, with few resources to compel EU governments to actually implement it.
The policy paper comes after a consultation over the summer involving 85 stakeholders, from right-holders, rights management societies and commercial users. There was broad consensus that the status quo was not an option.
However, the European authors’ rights societies body GESAC claimed that if right holders were given the choice to authorize a collecting society, it “carries the risk of creating total disarray in collective management in the EU, an upsurge in piracy, and wrecking the balance between rightholders, to the detriment of the smallest.”
