Alex Damon, a Solicitor with London firm Russells, told delegates at a recent Music 4.5 seminar in London that collecting societies, publishers and songwriters should encourage new services to exploit music, urging them to provide ‘moratoria to give them time to prove themselves’.
‘There has to be a fair way of licensing these platforms - revenues must find their way back to rightsholders. It’s hard, there is no one solution, and rightsholders have had their fingers burnt in the past,’ he said. ‘But when you have someone who’s just launched something innovative and creative, we must let them have a runway to build up some steam.’
His comments formed part of a wider debate on generating value for rightsholders from User Generated Content (UGC) platforms including start-ups and established services such as YouTube or SoundCloud. Panel moderator Cliff Fluet, Partner at Silkin Lewis, said there were historical issues clouding current practices, adding that technology and copyright were like a ‘warring couple’. He pointed to the turn of the millennium, when rightsholders issued licensing moratoria to new digital music businesses. ‘Those moratoria allowed many of them to flourish,’ he said. ‘Then those start-ups grew and were sold for a great deal of money.’
Sophie Goossens, Senior Attorney-at-Law, August & Debouzy, added: ‘I believe solutions do exist that try to reconcile technology and copyright, in terms of simplified licensing models and other initiatives. But the Chief Executive of Getty Images once said that you should never stand in the way of technology or consumer behaviour. Users are going to use, and they will find the content wherever they need to. We can’t stand in the way of consumers and technology, because they can stand together and become stronger.’
UGC is one of the biggest growth areas in the digital space, and is a key outlet for music. Each minute, 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube alone and the platform boasts over one billion users. PRS for Music has licensed YouTube since 2005.
http://www.music4point5.com/
‘There has to be a fair way of licensing these platforms - revenues must find their way back to rightsholders. It’s hard, there is no one solution, and rightsholders have had their fingers burnt in the past,’ he said. ‘But when you have someone who’s just launched something innovative and creative, we must let them have a runway to build up some steam.’
His comments formed part of a wider debate on generating value for rightsholders from User Generated Content (UGC) platforms including start-ups and established services such as YouTube or SoundCloud. Panel moderator Cliff Fluet, Partner at Silkin Lewis, said there were historical issues clouding current practices, adding that technology and copyright were like a ‘warring couple’. He pointed to the turn of the millennium, when rightsholders issued licensing moratoria to new digital music businesses. ‘Those moratoria allowed many of them to flourish,’ he said. ‘Then those start-ups grew and were sold for a great deal of money.’
Sophie Goossens, Senior Attorney-at-Law, August & Debouzy, added: ‘I believe solutions do exist that try to reconcile technology and copyright, in terms of simplified licensing models and other initiatives. But the Chief Executive of Getty Images once said that you should never stand in the way of technology or consumer behaviour. Users are going to use, and they will find the content wherever they need to. We can’t stand in the way of consumers and technology, because they can stand together and become stronger.’
UGC is one of the biggest growth areas in the digital space, and is a key outlet for music. Each minute, 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube alone and the platform boasts over one billion users. PRS for Music has licensed YouTube since 2005.
http://www.music4point5.com/
