state51

Category: regulation

  • Remedies Can Make UMG Buying EMI Good For The Whole Music Industry

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    There seems little point in trying to block the acquisition of EMI’s recorded music business by French conglomerate Vivendi. Citibank, EMI’s owners, have made it clear that they don’t give a fig what Roger Faxon thinks about EMI’s structure or prospects as a standalone company. The UK Government seems determined to watch from the wings,…

  • We Need a Creators’ Revolution in Music

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    It is telling how difficult it has proved in the UK for artists and songwriters to find their own voice. The Featured Artists Coalition (artists signed to record labels) has started for sure, but unless I am mistaken its funding comes from PPL, which is owned by the BPI. He who pays the piper… In…

  • The ‘Hysterical Rant’ School of Lobbying Makes, Not Solves, Problems

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    Richard Mollett, writing on the Publishers Association blog, makes a strident and impassioned plea for the Government to drop its demands for evidence and just accept his credo on the harm done by copyright infringement. He does himself a disservice in comparing the properly sceptical to flat earthers and climate change deniers. A music industry…

  • Copyright Extension, But Nothing for the Artists

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    The EU looks like it will vote to extend copyright in sound recordings to a maximum of 70 years. Today’s Financial Times notes that the chief beneficiaries are the record labels, who get an additional term on valuable old copyrights (Love Me Do was due to move to the public domain next year) and will…

  • Traffic Lights: Copyright Education or Leverage?

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    The PRS has proposed that music related search results should be flagged with a ‘traffic lights’ indicator of whether, according to an independent body, the site linked to is properly licensed for music. The BPI had a similar ‘consumer education’ scheme, whereby approved sites got to display a badge. This seems a very simple idea.…

  • Hargreaves: A Copyright Policy Cop Out

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    I was asked by ORG to write a short response to the Hargreaves IP Review, and have subsequently found myself a bit out on a limb, particularly in my opinions about his proposal for the DCE. In my defence I plead the fatigue of dealing with large volumes of music and rights metadata daily for…

  • Pandora Tries to Flatten Earth – Cloud Dumps on PRS

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    A few years ago Pandora tried to launch in the UK, taking a PPL or nothing approach to licensing which unsurprisingly failed. I thought they missed a trick, and could have established a strong foothold with independent catalogues – which is where all the exciting new music is anyway – at low cost, and then…

  • Music Clouds, Portability, and Graduated Response

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    Clouds look like bad news to me. Instead of the greater efficiency of shared resources it looks to me like they are all attempts to inflate switching costs and achieve higher profitability, at the expense of efficiency and consumer value. Remarkable though how Silicon Valley rehabilitates a metaphor of the formerly unwelcome, and endows it…

  • Equity for a Licence: a Kingdom for a Horse

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    Trying to wade through the submissions to the UK Intellectual Property Office’s IP review threw up the following quotation, from the BPI’s submission: It appears that the flexibility in voluntary copyright licensing has facilitated that growth. Record companies have reportedly obtained equity stakes in several internet start-ups, including Lala, Imeem and Spotify. It is not…

  • Fix The Market, Not Copyright Law

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    The UK Government has announced another review into IP under Professor Ian Hargreaves; does it or does it not, on balance, generate the optimal amount of GDP growth and jobs? The UK is, relatively, a major creative power, being a net exporter of music, and not doing too badly in areas like computer games, advertising, media…