SUMMARY OF CISAC’S WORLD COPYRIGHT SUMMIT - Brussels, June 7 & 8, 2011

SUMMARY OF CISAC’S WORLD COPYRIGHT SUMMIT #3 Panel by Panel, Speech by Speech Brussels, June 7 & 8, 2011

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World Copyright Summit 7 & 8 June, 2011 Square – Brussels Meeting Centre Glass Entrance - Mont des Arts - B-1000 Brussels

A two-day conference organised by

CONTENTS Executive Summary.................................................................................................................................5

DAY 1 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Keynote Speech: Europe - Driving force for the digital economy Neelie Kroes......................................................................................................................................... 10

Super Session: Creators’ voices on the digital agenda Maureen Duffy, Lorenzo Ferrero, Yves Nilly........................................................................................ 12

Presentation: Europe’s creative industries – Contributors to economic growth Philippe Kern........................................................................................................................................ 14

Presentation: Do you speak European? The impact of multilingualism on the single digital market Olivier Bomsel ...................................................................................................................................... 16

Panel Discussion: Europe’s single digital market – Myths and realities Eduardo Bautista, Olivier Bomsel, Philippe Kern, Christopher Marcich, Frances Moore, Konstantinos Rossoglou ............................................................................................................................................ 18

Exclusive study : Creating value in the digital economy David Touve ......................................................................................................................................... 21

Panel Discussion: Creating value - Future models for creative industries Reinhard Büscher, Axel Dauchez, Hanns-Peter Frentz, Michel Lambot, Valdo Lehari jr,.Andrew Orlowski, Katri Sipilä ........................................................................................................................... 23

Viewpoints: The role of ISPs in the creative eco-system Gavin Bonnar, Christophe Depreter, Alain Lauzon, Paul Hitchman, Stephen Navin, Eddie Schwartz26

Keynote Conversation: In my world… The future of books Arnaud Nourry, interviewed by Liz Bury .............................................................................................. 29

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Focus Session: From Gutenberg to the eBook…The changing economics of the printed word Paul Aiken, Jean-Claude Bologne, Liz Bury, Aline Côté, Pirjo Hiidenmaa, Simon Juden, Michael Tamblyn ............................................................................................................................................... 33

Focus Session: Metadata standards – The foundations of value Michel Allain, Maureen Cavan, Janifer Gatenby, Oliver Heckmann, Carl Inwood, Mark Isherwood, FX Nuttall ................................................................................................................................................... 36

Focus Session: Resale right - What does it mean for artists, heirs and the art market?

Georgina Adam, Guillaume Cerutti, Helen Dolby, Meret Meyer, Andrew Potter, Christiane Ramonbordes....................................................................................................................................... 40

Focus Session: The benefits of copyright compliance – Russia’s experience Mitko Chatalbashev, Maxim Dimitriev, Sergey Fedotov, Olga Kim, Nenad Marcec, Alexandre Polesitski .............................................................................................................................................. 43

Keynote Speech: Shaping the future for creative industries - Culture and innovation: The Google approach Carlo d'Asaro Biondo, interviewed by Robert Hooijer.......................................................................... 46

Panel Discussion: Building bridges between creators and the digital generation Jean-Jacques Arjoon, Richard Charkin, Penny Grubb, Keith Harris, Helienne Lindvall, Horacio Maldonado, Klaus Thymann ................................................................................................................ 48

Super Session: Creators’ voice - The future of visual arts Georgina Adam, Theodore Feder, Hervé Di Rosa .............................................................................. 51

Keynote Speech: Creators – The agents of cultural diversity Ivo Josipović......................................................................................................................................... 53

Wrap up of the first day of the Summit Paul Williams .......................................................................................................................53

DAY 2 - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 Welcome Speech Stijn Coninx .......................................................................................................................................... 56

Keynote Conversation: Global perspectives on IP and copyright – The role of international organisations Francis Gurry interviewed by Eric Baptiste .......................................................................................... 57

Panel Discussion: European perspectives on IP and copyright – Creators meet policy-makers Frank Dostal, Marisa Fernandez Esteban, Marielle Gallo, Alfons Karabuda, Lisbeth Kirk, Maria Martin-Prat, Johannes Studinger, Dariusz Urbanski............................................................................ 59

Keynote Speech: US perspectives on IP and copyright Victoria Espinel .................................................................................................................................... 62

Super Session: Creators’ voice - The future of copyright in India Javed Akhtar interviewed by Simon Darlow ........................................................................................ 64

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Focus Session: New solutions - An update on European online licensing Nicolas Galibert, Harald Heker, Andrew Jenkins, Nicholas Motsatse, Albert Pastore, András Szinger ............................................................................................................................................................. 66

Focus Session: New solutions – Global copyright management databases Robert Ashcroft, Eric Baptiste, Susan Butler, Neil Gaffney, Bendik Hofseth, Sylvain Piat.................. 69

Focus Session: Connecting creators and consumers Sandra Aistars, Fred Bolza, Niamh Byrne, Lucinda Fell, Helienne Lindvall, Marie-Françoise Marais, Martin Salamon .................................................................................................................................... 73

Super Session: Creators’ voice – Fair deals for audiovisual creators Ray Bennett, Andrew Chowns, Dariusz Jablonski, Gerhard Pfennig, Jean-Paul Salomé, Imanol Uribe ............................................................................................................................................................. 76

Keynote Conversation: Taking control of the digital challenges Robert Levine interviewed by Brett Cottle ........................................................................................... 79

Panel Discussion: The dos and don’ts of licensing Richard Conlon, Ben Drury, Tom Frederikse, Justin Kalifowitz, Jakob Hüttel, Emmanuel Legrand ... 81

Keynote Conversation: Modernising copyright for digital media: The broadcasters’ approach Jean-Paul Philippot, interviewed by Janine Lorente ............................................................................ 84

Panel Discussion: The Cloud… What it means for rights owners and tech companies Robert Ashcroft, Antony Bebawi, John LoFrumento, Jeremy Silver.................................................... 86

Super Session: Creators’ voice - In my world… Jean Michel Jarre Jean-Michel Jarre, Interviewed by Patrick Rackow ............................................................................. 89

Panel Discussion: Collective management – Solution provider for the digital economy David Arnold, Kerstin Jorna, Bernard Miyet, Ralph Peer, Ralph Simon, Sami Valkonen, Magdalena Vinent, Peter Weber............................................................................................................................. 91

Keynote Speech: Intellectual property, copyright and collective management A European perspective Michel Barnier ...................................................................................................................................... 95

Closing Speech: Connecting with creators and authors’ societies Robin Gibb ........................................................................................................................................... 97

All the photos, speeches and videos of the World Copyright Summit are available on the CISAC & Summit’s websites www.cisac.org – www.copyrightsummit.org Editorial: Rémi Bouton, Adrian Crookes, Juliana Koranteng, Anthea Sarris, Nicola Slade, Emmanuel Legrand, Marianne Rollet All Photos © 2011 Michael Chia / CISAC Disclaimer: The articles contained here within reflect the views of the Summit’s speakers and do not in any way reflect the opinions and recommendations of CISAC.

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Executive Summary Summit fosters dialogue and points way to the future CISAC’s World Copyright Summit sparked a series of intense discussions about the future of creators and their industries in the digital age.

Creators, policy-makers and industry leaders believe the creative industries are fit for purpose in the new digital era, even though the evolution of the digital ecosystem is creating new challenges for the copyright-based economy.

This was the central message from the World Copyright Summit — held on June 7-8, 2011 in Brussels at the Square Conference Centre and organised by CISAC (the International Confederation of Authors’ Rights Societies).

Throughout the event, representatives from the creative industries, rights holders and content users stressed the need for an open and fruitful dialogue between stakeholders and agreed that the new ecosystem would require flexible and adapted licensing schemes, ad hoc copyright legislation, efficient business models, collective management organisations tuned into the needs st consumers. of the 21 century, and schemes to raise awareness and educate consumers.

The Summit was the platform for “an open and truthful dialogue about the future of creative industries”, according to CISAC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors Kenth Muldin. Representatives from all the creative disciplines, Muldin said, had shown that, “despite their diversity, they share common goals in supporting the rights of creators, while finding together workable solutions for the challenges of the current marketplace”.

L‐R: Kenth Muldin, Robin Gibb, Yves Nilly

In this context, Muldin cited initiatives such as the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) and crossborder licensing for musical works; moves to uphold the value of book content through a specific pricing model of eBooks, the use of DRMs and the launch of legal platforms by book publishers; the harmonisation of the resale right for visual artists in Europe and, it is hoped, worldwide; and the need to harmonise audiovisual copyright laws across Europe to support the digital distribution of films and ensure that authors receive remunerated every time their works are used.

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Visions of creators During the Summit, creators from all backgrounds voiced their hope that the new digital economy would be built around respect for artists’ creations. In his Summit’s closing speech, British songwriter and performer Robin Gibb, in his capacity of President of CISAC, spoke of his optimism about the future of copyright and the creative industries.

Reminding participants of the European Commission statement on the recently published ‘Strategy for Intellectual Property’, Gibb enthused: “The case does not need to be made any more: intellectual property rights in their different forms and shapes are key assets of the EU economy.”

Gibb added: “By acknowledging that intellectual property rights, including copyright, are key to the future prosperity of Europe, [the European Commission] implicitly accept that those who create those rights, those who underpin the whole of the creative industries, are also vital. These people are the authors. They are the key assets and should be cherished and nurtured as such.”

Gibb pleaded for a greater dialogue between the various stakeholders to ensure a sound future for both the creative industries and creative individuals. In his view, this can only be secured “if those who control, license and use our rights begin to take a longer term view. Scrabbling for individual short-term corporate commercial advantage will not build a sustainable model that ensures a healthy creative future.”

Reflecting on the Summit’s tag line — ‘Create – Connect – Respect’ — French visual artist and painter Hervé Di Rosa, also Vice-President of CISAC, observed that the internet represents “a fantastic tool for spreading creations worldwide. Respect, which is one of the key word in the 2011 slogan of the Summit, is therefore essential for us. It demonstrates that the role of authors’ societies is not only to look after financial interests, but also to protect images and creations of artists”.

“History shows that creators have always depended on technology,” noted French electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre. “Digital revolution creates quite a lot of hope and possibilities for any creators.

We gathered in Brussels also because this revolution creates legal issue on creation protection.”

US composer, songwriter and actor Paul Williams, who is also President and Chairman of the Board of the US author’s society ASCAP, referred to the vital role that authors’ societies play in adding value Robin Gibb & Jean‐Michel Jarre to, and earning respect for, creativity.

“One thing we know is that creators’ rights are best served by the professionals in the world’s authors’ rights societies — more so than ever before in the current digital ecosystem we must all survive in,” Williams said.

For Yves Nilly, French author, screenwriter and Chair of the International Council of Composers of Dramatic, Literary and Audiovisual Works (CIADLV), the new ecosystem “makes it more than ever necessary to strengthen collective management as it is the only system that can ensure fair remuneration for authors”.

Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, Chair of the International Council of Composers of Music (CIAM) and a member of the Italian authors’ society SIAE, called upon the European Union to establish “a strong and clear legislation — even more and better — than in any single country” to help creators navigate the digital age. He also urged the EU to “protect moral rights, especially paternity and integrity of the works, both during the time of material protection and beyond”.

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For his part, Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer Imanol Uribe fully backed the notion of pan-European legislation that would introduce the concept of remuneration for authors, regardless of the use of their works. “In Spain, we have established the principle that authors should benefit from all the exploitations of their works,” Uribe said.

Visions of policy-makers Policy-makers also added their voices to the debate on the future of the creative industries in the digital age. The presence of top policy-makers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean was further proof, said CISAC’s Muldin, that these issues are seen as crucial to a nation’s economy in the digital age. It also indicated the importance that creators will play in the new configuration.

In one of her first major speaking engagements outside the US, the White House’s IP enforcement officer Victoria Espinel outlined her country’s strategy in the field of IP and pleaded for a dialogue between all the stakeholders. “Intellectual property is critical to the internet,” Espinel declared. “And not just for the creators and innovators — it is also of critical importance for consumers. We need to do three simple things: make sure we have good laws and then enforce those laws; engage the private sector, and create voluntary solutions through productive conversations; and educate consumers.”

Kenth Muldin & Victoria Espinel

At the Summit, European Commissioner Michel Barnier offered his vision on authors’ right and the pivotal role of creators in the digital age in a speech entitled ‘To be or not to be: copyright makes all the difference’. “Authors’ rights are not out of fashion,” Barnier said. “They haven’t aged even a 100 years after the Bern Convention was adopted. On the contrary, they are at the heart of the evolving digital world.”

Michel Barnier & Jean‐Michel Jarre

Barnier outlined his ambitious plan for the creative industries, which include a review of the collectivemanagement system, facilitating licensing and enforcing rights. For Barnier, the time has come to stop “opposing [the] internet and creation”.

He explained: “I would like to set up an enabling framework that will facilitate licensing at the European level and is adapted to the expectations of more mobile consumers of cultural works in the digital era. This framework will be presented by the beginning of 2012 at the latest, with the clear purpose of facilitating the aggregation repertoires into licensing hubs. By doing so, we will ensure that the creators’ rights are respected, and that we provide consumers with more choices for the online content they want.”

Barnier’s message was reinforced by that of Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda. “We need a copyright system fit for the digital era,” she said. “I dream of artists really living from their art and spreading it around the world. I therefore imagine them embracing the opportunities of the digital era and European citizens benefiting from all this.

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Kroes added: “The European Commission is creating a legal framework to facilitate the digitisation and dissemination of cultural works and will propose legislation to simplify collective management in Europe. We will also launch a debate on the opportunities and challenges of online distribution of audiovisual works. And we will make sure that the copyright enforcement regime is adapted to the digital era.”

For Ivo Josipović, elected President of the Republic of Croatia and a composer in his own right, the system of collective management will continue ensure that the works of creators are respected and remunerated while cultural diversity is guaranteed. “Everything done

by CISAC is valuable for cultural importance,” said President Josipović, on the eve of his country’s acceptance into the European Union. “It is important for us to have international contacts and to engage our societies to help cultural activities.”

L‐R: Robin Gibb, Ivo Josipovic , Paul Williams

The view from industry leaders Several industry leaders also used the Summit to present their vision of the future of the creative industries. Carlo d’Asaro Biondo, Google’s President for Southern and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, said the current environment requires pragmatism on all sides. To work through the issues, the creative industries must have “enough trust in each other to experiment together”, he said. And that means “not to expect a result before we know how it works”.

Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Livre, expressed his faith in the future of printed books — and his belief that the digital world would be beneficial to his industry. “We decided, especially in America, to be extremely active in the digital field, to digitise books in partnership with the different players — Amazon, Google, Barnes & Nobles, etc — and by doing that, we managed to provide 10 platforms in the US [offering] the entire catalogues of publishers. That created a fantastic experience for consumers. They can find all the books they want in digital format at affordable prices. And that’s why the market has taken off and it’s good for everyone.”

For Nourry, “copyright is fit for the digital age”. He Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project, elaborated: “What we see in digital mature markets like the & Robin Gibb US or the UK is that it does work. We have a few questions on the table — orphan works, out of print works — and there is a need to have changes in copyright laws in many countries to address these issues. As far as the commercial works available, I don’t see any major reason for altering the copyright laws and environment, because it works.”

Jean-Paul Philippot, the President of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU-UER), who is also in charge of RTBF, Belgium’s French-speaking public-service broadcaster, expressed his belief that the new environment would benefit broadcasters, the producers and creators of content, and consumers.

“We see the changes [in the digital environment] as opportunities, because audiovisual works are made to be broadcast, and new means of consuming images are new opportunities to circulate works,” said Philippot, who added that this needed to be organised within a new legal framework for AV works. “We are in favour of an extended system of collective licensing that will have the benefit of creating a framework that will safeguard our rights and limit both the number of players and the number of transactions,” Philippot said.

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Over 730 participants Overall, the third edition of the World Copyright Summit brought together over 730 participants from 57 countries. The event was organised by CISAC and co-ordinated by CISAC Communications Director Marianne Rollet.

Over 130 speakers took to the stage for the biennial event, including world renowned creators, such as Bollywood legend Javed Akhtar, British songwriter and performer Robin Gibb, French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, visual artist Hervé Di Rosa and Spanish filmmaker Imanol Uribe; IP policy leaders, including Ivo Josipović (President of Croatia), Michel Barnier (European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services), Victoria Espinel (US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator), Francis Gurry (WIPO Director General) and Neelie Kroes (Vice President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda); and key industry executives, such as Carlo d'Asaro Biondo (Google Vice-President for Southern and Eastern Europe, MEA), Arnaud Nourry (Hachette Livre Chairman and CEO) and Jean-Paul Philippot (European Broadcasting Union President).

A myriad of topics Over the two-day conference programme, which was put together by media consultant and journalist Emmanuel Legrand, participants discussed and debated a myriad of topics, including: • The status of creators in the digital age • The role of collective management in the new era • The creation of value in the new ecosystem • The advent of a single European digital market • The role and responsibilities of ISPs • New licensing schemes and business models • The impact of the cloud on the creative industries • The evolution of the book-publishing industry • The value and importance of the re-sale right for visual artists • The new copyright regime for audiovisual works • Changes in copyright law in India and Russia • Metadata and global databases as the foundation of the digital economy.

Muldin concluded: “In just the short four years that CISAC has hosted the World Copyright Summit, we have seen tremendous changes in the relationships between creators and rights holders and the technology used to access those works digitally, as well as the governmental policies that shape these interactions.

Rather than confrontational interactions, we heard meaningful discussions about current realities and solutions for the future. Innovations such as cloud-based services are the current buzz, but we must remember that none of these services would be of any interest without the demand for creative content — music, literary works, films, pictures — and we must all work together to maintain a sustainable ecosystem where all can thrive.”

The next World Copyright Summit will take place in 2013.

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DAY 1 – JUNE 7, 2011 – 8:40 AM

Keynote Speech: Europe - Driving force for the digital economy Neelie Kroes

Keynote speaker: Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Digital Agenda, European Commission Link to: [Video and Blog article] [Photos]

Kroes: ‘Let us make Europe the best place to create’ The European Commission’s Vice-President, Neelie Kroes, urged delegates to adhere to her vision of a Digital Agenda for Europe in her keynote speech at the World Copyright Summit, reports Adrian Crookes.

Neelie Kroes, the European Commission Vice-President, opened proceedings at the third World Copyright Summit in Brussels with a plea to copyright holders. The Commissioner for the Digital Agenda used her opening address to explain her vision for Europe, based on a copyright system “fit for the digital era”. “It is time for us to live up to our European potential,” she said.

The Dutch policy-maker offered no solution for such a system — “I am utterly neutral about how we get there…” — but it was clear her sights were set on the US. “Our [Europe’s] market for digital content is lagging behind,” she said. And to ram the point home, she had statistics and examples.

She noted that half of US record-company revenues came from digital sources in 2010. “The figure in Europe,” she added, “is a mere 20%.”

Kroes suggested that audiovisual markets were also stronger in the US and cited the success of the on-demand streaming platform Netflix, “the largest single source of internet traffic in North America” with “no pan-European equivalent”. And she was unhappy that the Spotify music service — founded in Europe and a European creative success story — was “unable to run a pan-European service”.

“While US companies compete to provide an attractive online content experience to millions of consumers, Europe can boast several regional players at best,” she observed. This statement set the scene for the following debate about the ability and desirability of a European Digital Single Market.

But for now, the Commissioner was clear. “This has to change,” she said.

Create a legal framework Kroes outlined the Commission’s agenda in creating a “legal framework to facilitate the digitisation and dissemination of cultural works” that “allows businesses to develop attractive new offers on different platforms and across borders”. She highlighted three pieces of work the Commission was currently undertaking to facilitate change: collective rights management legislation, a Green Paper on audiovisual distribution and a commitment to copyright enforcement.

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The Commissioner acknowledged that the path towards her vision may be a bumpy one — “The different players in the chain may have to change their role,” she suggested — but ultimately felt that a new copyright system would benefit creators and consumers alike. She believed that growth and jobs would result from the free circulation of online content and services across EU borders and pledged her commitment to “smart growth” based on knowledge and innovation.

It was a plea to trust her and reminiscent of the UK coalition government’s rallying cry of ‘we’re all in this together’. “Just as I share your values and passion for the creative arts, so I hope that you will share my pragmatism,” was the Commissioner’s version. “So let us again make Europe the best place to create,” she concluded, “and let us bring our crown jewel — the single market — to copyright.”

It was a clear call to arms and, as an opening address, the Commissioner set the tone for much of what was to come in the following two days.

Kroes’s agenda certainly caught the attention of CISAC’s Chair of the Board of Directors, Kenth Muldin, who introduced the Commissioner in Brussels with the following words: “We do not always see eye to eye with some of her [Kroes] initiatives, but we agree on a few points: the Digital Agenda is paramount to the future of Europe; and creators — and their societies — will play a key role in the development of the digital economy.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 9:00 AM

Super Session: Creators’ voices on the digital agenda Maureen Duffy, Lorenzo Ferrero, Kenth Muldin, Yves Nilly

From left to right: Maureen Duffy, Lorenzo Ferrero, Yves Nilly, Kenth Muldin

Speakers: Maureen Duffy, poet, playwright and novelist / Honorary President of ALCS (UK) Lorenzo Ferrero, composer / Chair of CIAM (International Council of Composers of Music) / Member of SIAE (Italy) Yves Nilly, author and screenwriter / Chair of CIADLV (International Council of Composers of Dramatic, Literary and Audiovisual Works) / Member of SACD (France) Moderator: Kenth Muldin, Chair of CISAC Board of Directors / CEO, STIM (Sweden) Link to: [Video and Blog article] [Photos]

Creators outline vision for the digital age Three creators responded in a polite but guarded fashion to European Commissioner Neelie Kroes’ opening keynote speech at the World Copyright Summit, reports Nicola Slade.

In her speech at the World Copyright Summit, European Commission Vice-President and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes used the opportunity to again stress the need to work towards a single European digital market.

Responding to her remarks during the session ‘Creators’ voices on the digital agenda’ were three European creators: Maureen Duffy, poet, playwright and novelist and Honorary President of the British literary society ALCS; composer Lorenzo Ferrero, Chair of the International Council of Composers of Music (CIAM) and a member of the Italian authors’ society SIAE; and Yves Nilly, author, screenwriter and Chair of the International Council of Composers of Dramatic, Literary and Audiovisual Works (CIADLV).

Duffy, who recited a self-penned poem defending the importance of copyright, applauded the European Commission to some extent and amusingly addressed Kroes directly: “Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.

However, the acclaimed and prolific British writer warned of the immediate dangers confronting the creator: “Technology gives us a global audience, but not yet the means to support the creation for it.

Instead, it is in danger of encouraging an amateur or cottage industry, leaving the professional practice of the arts to those who can fund themselves or have a state or private patron.”

Duffy continued: “It is they [the policy-makers] who must bang their heads together until there is a mutually beneficial answer, and the Commissioner [Kroes] has already begun this process by bringing groups together and taking an active part in this conference.”

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Seeking global solutions Ferrero expressed gratitude for Kroes’ supportive remarks, but was equally keen to stress the importance of Europe and European creators on the global stage. “Every step we take in the digital world shows that anything European is also global and anything global is also European,” he said.

“While it is important to find common ground and rules in Europe, it is also important to keep the dialogue open with worldwide organisations such as CISAC... up to WIPO and even WTO.” Duffy also alluded to the need to “find global solutions”, naming the Google settlement between the internet giant and authors and publishers as an example of the way forward. “Flawed as it was, at least it attempted to provide [a global solution],” said Duffy, who noted that nine of her books were on a Google database “without my permission or any payment”.

She added: “This is not to knock Google but to plead for negotiated solutions,” stressing that she was also a proponent of the “great European concept of fair remuneration”.

Both Ferrero and Nilly spoke of their concern over the issue of moral rights, the question of coercion and the need to maintain the ‘integrity’ of any artistic creation. For example, Ferrero called on the EU to “protect the freedom of choice of the authors when they commit to the commercial exploitation of their works to a publisher for the first time and when their rights are passed to another publisher through mergers and take-overs. After all, this means also the protection of free market competition.”

For Ferrero, the EU should establish for the digital age “a strong and clear legislation — even more and better — than in any single country”. He added that it should also “protect moral rights, especially paternity and integrity of the works, both during the time of material protection and beyond”.

Ensure fair remuneration Nilly echoed Ferrero’s concerns, suggesting that the originality of cultural goods is in danger from the potential dominance of a limited number of players in the digital market: “Our work on the internet should not look like Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times’, re-hashed and pulled under the wheels of a huge cultural machine, driven by mass production adapted only to the needs of industry. We do not want to be — and the public neither — under the control of a march that would produce uniformity.”

Nilly remarked that the simple fact that there was a dialogue with the European Commission was “a positive step”. He added: “In recent time, the voice of authors and creators were muted far too often.”

For Nilly, the development of multiple digital platforms allows “our works to travel and meet with the audience”, but he warned that it should be “by respecting [the rights] of everyone”. The new digital environment “makes it more than ever necessary to strengthen collective management that is the only system that can ensure fair remuneration for authors, including the new ones. Who else but authors’ societies can negotiate and find a consensus with all the other stakeholders, and collect and distribute rights in a fair, efficient and transparent way?”

He elaborated: “Our authors’ societies are not the bad guys in this scenario. They are our partners.

We have chosen them. They are indispensable for the defence and the exercise of our rights.”

Delegates responded well to the creators’ keynotes and it was their combined vision that set the tone for the rest of the Summit: pragmatic, hopeful and open-minded.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 9:30 AM

Presentation: Europe’s creative industries – Contributors to economic growth Philippe Kern

Presentation by: Philippe Kern, Founder and Managing Director, KEA European Affairs (Belgium)

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Kern: ‘Creativity is a sector worth investing in’ Philippe Kern argued in his World Copyright Summit presentation that the creative industries are crucial to the global economy, but their importance is not properly recognised by policymakers, writes Juliana Koranteng.

“Authors, artists, creators, and the cultural and creative industries are an important part of economic and social policies and strategies, and a great factor of competitiveness,” said Philippe Kern, founder and managing director of the Brussels-based research firm KEA European Affairs in his World Copyright Summit presentation, ‘Europe’s creative industries – contributors to economic growth’.

“This message needs to be stressed among policy-makers,” Kern stated, adding: “We also need to acknowledge that this sector brings more than economic value — it brings sense and meaning to life.

If we are able to get that message across, that we contribute as a sector both economically and socially, we can avoid any marginalisation in policy-making. We can actually play a full role in partnering with policy-makers when those policy-makers are looking to foster and stimulate innovation and creativity.”

In his session, Kern said that concrete data on creators’ input into the world’s economy is rare and that available statistics do not take other unseen factors into account. These include the contributions made by numerous ‘micro’ enterprises and freelancers, and every attempt must be made to redress that shortfall, he urged. He also noted that the last major research on the sector in the EU dated back to 2003. “But what was an astonishment to policy-makers at the time [2003] was the importance in terms of jobs and in terms of turnover of the creative sector,” Kern added. $2.2 trillion and growing According to Kern, analysts predict that the global media and entertainment sectors will be contributing a staggering $2.2 trillion to the world’s economy by 2012. He said, moreover, that this $2.2 trillion figure might even be a conservative estimate because policy-makers worldwide are failing to acknowledge the full financial value of the creative and cultural industries to global economic growth.

Based on currently available data, he noted that world trade in the creative industries grew between 2002 and 2008, and continued to increase despite the international economic crisis in 2008.

Additionally, world export in the visual arts doubled to $29.7 billion in the six years to 2008, as did the export of audiovisual services, which rose to $26.4 billion during the same period.

Moreover, this growth trajectory was reflected in the 1.7% increase in the royalties collected by CISAC’s 225 member societies to €7.152 billion in 2009.

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In the European Union alone, the creative and cultural industries contributed more than €654 billion to the region’s economy in 2003, accounting for 2.6% of its gross domestic product (GDP), according to Kern. By 2004, the sectors employed 5.8 million people across the EU’s 25 states. By 2006, the creative and cultural businesses represented 3.3% of the EU’s GDP and, by 2008, they were employing 6.7 million citizens in the 27 EU states.

“The cultural and creative sector, at European level, is larger than ICT manufacturing or car manufacturing,” Kern said. “So it is a bigger sector than others that have bigger voices in the corridors of power.”

Fostering creativity Kern singled out similar growth trends in Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, where the cultural and creative sectors grew throughout the last decade. The same has been observed for China, based on figures from its government, while research group PricewaterhouseCoopers also forecasts growth in the Middle East, Africa, North America and Asia-Pacific. “Countries like China and India are looking to Europe as an example of a continent that has been able to foster creativity,” Kern added. “This is something we tend to forget.”

For Kern, the rapid rise in digital entertainment as seen in music and other content distributed via popular technologies such as Apple’s iPhone means creativity and culture touches on a host of other sectors that policy-makers might not consider relevant. He urged them to study the different forms of creativity as their definition varies from country to country, but should include the visual-arts sectors, the copyright industries, film, television, fashion design, luxury brands, advertising and architecture, plus related business such as tourism. Even economic, scientific and technological creativity, telecommunications and the various industries that evolve when these disciplines overlap should be included in the definition.

Developing policies “The cultural and creative sector is a cross-sector with multi-disciplinary interactions,” Kern said. “All those forms of creativity nourish themselves and enable society to be more innovative, not only at an industrial level, but at a social level too.”

He concluded his presentation with a call to the creative sector: “The strong message to policymakers should be that creativity is a sector worth investing in. It is more important than many wellknown and traditional industries with strong voices in the corridors of power. We should increase awareness of [the creative industries’] contribution and provide evidence for developing policies. We want to show how much our industries are of specific importance to other industries.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 9:40 AM

Presentation: Do you speak European? The impact of multilingualism on the single digital market Olivier Bomsel

Presentation by: Olivier Bomsel, professor, Ecole des Mines / author of ‘L’Économie immatérielle’ (France)

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Bomsel: ‘A single European market for content does not make sense’ In a thought-provoking World Copyright Summit presentation, economics professor Olivier Bomsel questioned the existence of a single market for creative content, reports Rémi Bouton.

The digital revolution does not impact in the same way on the creative economy in Brussels as it does in Washington, DC. This was the central message from Olivier Bomsel at the World Copyright Summit.

In his keynote presentation titled ‘Do you speak European? The impact of multilingualism on the single digital market’, the French professor of economics at the Ecole des Mines analysed the repercussions of multilingualism on the creative sector, and how it affects economies of scale in the production and distribution of content in the European market.

“Do you speak European?” asked Bomsel — and his answer was a resounding “No”. His next question was: “So how can a single market exist for meaning when the linguistic vehicle of meaning is different in 23 territories across Europe?” For Bomsel, in a market such as the European Union, where no less than 23 languages coexist, it is impossible to achieve the same economies of scale that are possible in more homogenous market like the US. Differences in language require the production of specific content, adapted to each population. From an economic standpoint, this tends to raise the cost of the creation, production and distribution of content.

Maximise revenues For Bomsel, who is the author of ‘L’Économie Immatérielle’ (‘The Immaterial Economy’; Gallimard), this situation specific to Europe goes against the European Union’s single-market policy. “For the content industry, it does not make sense,” he said. “Copyright protects expressions that circulate through media. Media are published to provide a meaning; to make sense. The meaning and its value are subjective and depend on the consumer, on his own references, his cultural fondness, his instant mood. The meaning and its value are known only after consumption. Each media product needs to create its own market. This is what economists call maximal adverse selection, which is a deception risk — the risk is deceived by the experience.”

Therefore, in Bomsel’s view, the distribution of cultural content is strategic, because media distribution relies on “brands, signalling and discrimination”. “The critical point is that if you manage to efficiently discriminate the distribution of the product, you maximise rights holders’ revenues, which can then be reinvested in media creation and diversity,” Bomsel added.

According to Bomsel, with 23 linguistic markets, Europe faces “very heavy” discrimination costs, as each linguistic market carries its own risk and needs to be addressed according to its cultural profile and its own rules of discrimination. Indeed, Bomsel believes the impact of multilingualism goes even further: “You don’t market the same francophone media in France and in Belgium. It requires its own set of investment in branding and signaling.”

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Economies of scale Bomsel also highlighted the economic patterns linked to multilingualism — one of which is that the EU cannot rely on the economies of scale and scope that are possible in single linguistic markets. “Large monolingual countries are strongly advantaged in media competition because they have lower distribution and discrimination costs,” he explained. “With the same investment, they can capture more money from their market. The problem is that you have no economies of scale in distributing the same product in various linguistic markets, because you have to replicate the signalling investment in each market.”

The consequences for Europe are many, said Bomsel, who pointed out that it is not possible to measure the production of meaning in the same way as you can measure production from energy industries or steel plants. “Meaning is hardly measurable in an objective way,” he observed.

Economic nonsense Therefore, from an economic perspective, “a single market for meaning in a multilingual continent is an absurdity. It’s an economic nonsense. It can be a dream but, from an economic perspective, it does not make sense.”

Bomsel also noted that, because media distribution and discrimination costs are structurally higher, Europe should be protected from global distributors pushing monolingual media brands. “If we don’t pay attention to the nature of competition in media distribution and to the nature of the discrimination schemes in each country, then global distributors can overwhelm local distributors and push large monolingual media brands,” he warned.

Instead, he suggested that media-discrimination schemes “should be optimised in each linguistic market” and that, instead of pushing cross-border licensing, efforts should be made to encourage cross-border media branding so as to build strong European media brands.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 9:55 AM

Panel Discussion: Europe’s single digital market – Myths and realities Eduardo Bautista, Olivier Bomsel, Philippe Kern, Christopher Marcich, Frances Moore, Konstantinos Rossoglou

From left to right : Philippe Kern, Eduardo Bautista, Olivier Bomsel, Christopher Marcich, Frances Moore, Konstantinos Rossoglou

Speakers: Eduardo Bautista, President of the Management Board, SGAE (Spain) Olivier Bomsel, professor, Ecole des Mines / author of ‘L’Economie immatérielle’ (France) Christopher Marcich, President and Managing Director, MPA Europe (Belgium) Frances Moore, CEO, IFPI (UK) Konstantinos Rossoglou, Legal Officer, BEUC (Belgium) Moderator: Philippe Kern, Founder and Managing Director, KEA European Affairs (Belgium) Link to: [Video and Blog article] [Photos]

The long road to Europe’s digital single market Following Neelie Kroes’ World Copyright Summit opening keynote, a panel of experts debated the reality of the single European digital market — and did not always agree with the European Commissioner’s vision, Adrian Crookes reports.

Attempting to define the European digital single market — and its benefits — led to conflicting visions at the World Copyright Summit. In her opening address, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said it would provide opportunities for creators and for new forms of cultural expression. Furthermore, she said, “the free circulation of online content and services inside the EU and across its borders will stimulate growth and create jobs”.

But is a European digital single market possible or desirable? And what does it mean and who wants it? French economics professor Oliver Bomsel provided his view in a presentation entitled ‘Do you speak European? The impact of multilingualism on the single digital market’, which turned upside down the Commissioner’s argument. According to Bomsel, a digital single market in Europe makes no sense. He argued that the co-existence of 23 different languages generates further costs, and that one market in Europe would simply favour global players, most likely from the US. For Bomsel, the European market needs to be addressed “according to its cultural profile and its own discrimination rules”, not least because “no economies of scale [can be achieved] in distributing the same product in various linguistic markets” as each market needs, for example, its own distribution and marketing schemes. “A single market for media in a multilingual continent is anti-economic,” Bomsel asserted.

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Access all areas The session ‘Europe’s single digital market – myths and realities’ that immediately followed Bomsel’s presentation further examined the concept of the European digital single market. The first thing to clarify was what a European digital single market actually meant. For Commissioner Kroes, this seemed to be about enabling pan-European services that could compete with their US counterparts.

Moderator Philippe Kern described Kroes’ speech as “the wish of a dream”.

For the panellists in this session, the single market was more about facilitating access to content for Europeans, wherever they were in Europe. The former presumably delivers homogenous one-sizefits-all services, while the latter retains local services but improves their accessibility.

Against this backdrop, Eduardo Bautista, at the time President of the Management Board of Spain’s authors’ society SGAE, made references to both Kern and Bomsel’s presentations, and wondered if Commissioner Kroes was “listening”. “The statistical analysis and economic approach of the reality is crucial and different to the dreams,” he said. “We are faced with the reality of the behaviour of the market.”

Bautista underlined two “extremely important” points made by Bomsel: first, that Europe should be sheltered from the global distributors of monolingual brands; and second, that media should be optimised for each linguistic market. “This is a must,” he said. “This is cultural diversity.”

It was a point underlined by Christopher Marcich, President and Managing Director of the European division of the US’ Motion Picture Association Europe, which regroups Hollywood’s studios. “We need to face the facts,” he said, “and for us, the reality of the single market [is that it is] there and we have supported it and adapted to it. But at the same time, you have to weigh that against the background of cultural diversity that we have learned to respect, and we can’t go against the policies and feelings of the people of Europe.”

Marcich added that the benefits of the single market must be weighed against the background of cultural diversity that defines Europe.

Recognising value Frances Moore, CEO of record industry body IFPI, suggested that the Commission’s motives for a digital single market had been outlined by Kroes in her keynote, when she had said that “interesting content in the pipes” was the key to investment in high-speed broadband in Europe. “The Commission gives it away,” Moore said. “[They] need more content to drive the IP industries.”

Moore argued that the industry was doing all it could as fast as it could to make content available legally across Europe. “The Commission has to recognise the value in the content itself,” she said.

Moore believed the European market should be allowed to grow organically, respectful of Europe’s 27 identities and 23 languages. “If the view of the Commission is that you have to have all the services operating all at once in 27 countries, this is not going to happen. We have to roll out services organically to different markets, respecting their cultural differences and local repertoires. If you force the growth of services, they will be in English,” she argued, “and that’s not respectful and that’s not cultural diversity.”

For the film industry, Marcich said there was a demand for localised versions, but warned that there was currently a danger of “undoing a very delicate business model in the audiovisual sector that has been built over the years”. He added: “The model is based on territoriality. It is based on local versions and it seems to provide consumers with what they want.”

Comparing the forthcoming Green Paper on audiovisuals with the experience of the cable and satellite Directive before it, Marcich voiced concerns about pulling apart a structure in order to create something that consumers might not want. “The reality is that there is not much demand for crossborder content,” he said. “So before one ventures into making fundamental changes, one has to anticipate whether there is a demand for changes and there has to be evidence of that.”

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Consumer frustration Economist Olivier Bomsel had a new twist on earlier expressions of consumer frustration. “Frustration creates markets,” he argued. “You cannot sell a product if you haven’t created consumer frustration [demand]; the desire for the product. It is normal marketing activity.” The issue for Bomsel lies therefore in creating distribution schemes and models that would create optimal value from consumer frustration.

Moderator Kern, meanwhile, was keen to explore any blocks to the development of services for European consumers.

“The digital single market for consumers is a myth. We are far from there,” said Konstantinos Rossoglou, Legal Officer of the European Consumers Organisation BEUC. Consumers should be able to access the content of their choice irrespective of the country where they are or their nationality, Rossoglou stated. “For example, here in Belgium, I have tried to access a Greek song for the past six months and I can’t find it on any legal platform,” he added. “I want to access my Greek subscription channel and I can’t. This is the kind of frustration that consumers have.”

Rossoglou also singled out the issue of access, using the example of a Norwegian subscriber to Spotify, who would lose access to the service after 40 days if he or she travelled. This prompted Kern to ask the panel if Europe was lagging behind the US in terms of digital content and missing an opportunity.

Moore welcomed this dialogue with consumers but said that Rossoglou’s remarks showed that “we still have a lot of work to do”. She added: “It’s organic and we work very hard with the platforms to make sure content is available.” She also stressed that “our job is to license content and that is what we are doing”.

Moore pointed out that there were 30 million tracks available and 250 legal services operating in Europe. “We can’t claim it’s all there, but we are well on our way to a single market in music,” she added. “Neelie Kroes has said that, if we fix licensing, legal services will increase and piracy will decrease. The UK experience, where there are 76 legal services and two thirds of the market is still lost to piracy, suggests this is false.”

For Rossoglou, the issue came back to marketing. In a recent survey in the UK, the majority of consumers were only aware of two of the 76 legal services. “That’s the problem,” he suggested.

Respect value Noting that rights societies have been licensing repertoire all around the world, Bautista said that he did not want consumers’ frustration to be pinned on authors’ societies. “I want to ensure that consumers aren’t blaming us [collecting societies],” he added. “We work hard to make sure we license the 20 million works we administer to anyone in the world.”

Bautista went on: “For the record, we love consumers and we work for the consumers. The only thing we don’t like are those who say they want to consume without paying. Things have a value and some have a cost. If we want to build that one single digital market, we have to make sure that the addedvalue chain is well respected by all parties.”

Moore concurred but added the proviso that the problem is not consumers who don’t pay, as there are legal free offers, financed by advertising, but rather consumers who use content for which they do not have the authorisation.

Meanwhile, the frustration of the panellists with EC intervention was evident. One of the issues raised

by Bautista is that policy-makers see copyright as an additional cost and a hindrance, instead of seeing that 63% of the rights collected in the world come from Europe. “We have the make sure that the value of the European market remains at that level and does not go down the drain,” Bautista said.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 11:00 AM

Exclusive study: Creating value in the digital economy David Touve

Presentation by: David Touve, Assistant Professor of Business, Washington and Lee University (USA) Link to: [Video and Blog article] [Photos]

David Touve outlines scenarios for creative industries in search of value Where can the creative sectors find true value based on how consumers use content? In his exclusive World Copyright Summit presentation, David Touve offered some answers, as Juliana Koranteng found out.

As digital technology makes creative content more easily accessible, it equally makes it more vulnerable to piracy abuse. So how can the creative industries extract value from the consumer’s use of content?

In his World Copyright Summit session titled ‘Creating value in the digital economy’, US academic David Touve proposed various scenarios to determine how revenues could be extracted from digitalto-consumer distribution to benefit the creative sector. The Assistant Professor of Business at Washington and Lee University did so by examining the income yielded from music digital downloads, subscription-based streamed services, bundled content and DVDs. “We are going to question the statement that no one pays for content online,” said Touve in his introduction. “In fact, most of us pay for content online, even if it seems for the price of free, but we don’t pay directly and you [rights holders] often don’t get paid. So my presentation will be about willingness to pay.”

Touve also looked into the impact of graduated-response policies against digital piracy in various countries. He then asked whether it is possible to determine the value of internet connection.

Additionally, he wondered whether the industry could rely on the results of consumer studies because the amount consumers said they would spend on content online could differ from what they actually did spend. Taking 1% of the UK population as a sample, which equalled a potential 623,000 customers, Touve calculated that the country’s music industry would earn £6.8 million a month if each one of these consumers were willing to pay £10.99 a month for digital-music services.

The potential monthly revenue increased to £57 million if 23% of the population were prepared to pay £3.99 a month — and rose to £59.5 million if 32% of them paid £2.99 a month. And these figures excluded the advanced royalties paid by the digital-music services to the music labels that own the rights to the recorded music.

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The nature of demand On the one hand, this scenario illustrated that premium pricing does not necessarily yield the best revenues for the labels. On the other hand, Touve said, it showed that labels also need to be realistic in their revenue expectations.

Even though the 850,000 British consumers in a study said they were prepared to pay £9.99 a month for streamed-music services like Spotify and We7, in reality fewer than 400,000 were paying that rate.

“In other words, there is a difference between what they said they would pay and what they actually pay,” Touve explained.

In addition to the damage it causes the creative sectors, piracy poses another problem. In India, legal movie DVDs cost INR (Indian Rupees) 250 each, while pirated versions cost only INR 25 each. But only 20 million units of legal DVDs are sold a year compared with between 600 million and 700 million pirated versions.

The legal sector earns INR 5 billion compared with the INR 17.5 billion lost to pirates. This presents a quandary for the legitimate Indian movie sector, Touve surmised. “Are you willing to learn about the nature of consumer demand even from pirates, even if it means lowering prices to make more money?” he asked. “Actually, here you could flip the market with lower prices and still make more money.”

Touve estimated that between €25 billion and €64 billion is spent annually to support the transmission of unlicensed content on the internet. Those amounts are worth pursuing by the content industries, especially when $256.5 billion was spent in 2009 on internet access alone by consumers.

Pockets of value Most internet services providers’ triple-play pricing strategy (for bundling the internet, TV and phone) is “pitched as if we had the internet and then we invented the television and the phone”, Touve said.

“But how can the connection be worth more than the content ?”, he asked.

Evidence indicates that consumers and service providers are beginning to appreciate the value of content. In countries such as Sweden and South Korea, the internet service providers implement graduated-response policies (GRP) to suspend the online accounts of persistent piracy offenders. In those markets, revenues from digital-music sales rose between 2009 and 2010, while they declined in countries without GRP. Touve also reported that 68% of European homes pay for the content distributed via cable TV. Some 17% of Brazilian households do the same and, in the US, fees paid for cable-TV content rose 160% from 1995 to 2008. If exploited wisely, these represent other pockets of value for the creative industries, he explained.

Touve concluded by admitting there is still a lot to learn as, unlike physical products, it is difficult to quantify the value of the creative businesses. “Creativity isn’t a product, nor is it a service,” he said.

“Creativity is a sensory experience that we all share — something we hear, feel and see. It is also a personal experience; it is a social experience; it is a cultural experience that expresses who we are and what we share; it is also a financial experience for someone to make a living.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 11:15 AM

Panel Discussion: Creating value Future models for creative industries Reinhard Büscher, Axel Dauchez, Hanns-Peter Frentz, Michel Lambot, Valdo Lehari jr,.Andrew Orlowski, Katri Sipilä

From left to right: Andrew Orlowski, Reinhard Büscher, Axel Dauchez, Hanns‐Peter Frentz, Michel Lambot, Katri Sipilä, Valdo Lehari jr.

Speakers: Reinhard Büscher, Head of Unit for Support for Industrial Innovation, DG Enterprise and Industry, European Commission (Belgium) Axel Dauchez, CEO, Deezer (France) Hanns-Peter Frentz, Director, BPK Photo Agency (Germany) Michel Lambot, Co-President of Impala / Co-Founder/Co-Chairman, PIAS / (Belgium) Valdo Lehari jr., Vice-President, ENPA (European Newspaper Publishers’ Association) / Publisher and Editor in Chief, Reutlinger General Anzeiger (Germany) Katri Sipilä, CEO, TEOSTO (Finland) Moderator: Andrew Orlowski, Executive Editor, The register (UK) Link to: [Video and Blog article] [Photos]

New models strive to sustain creative value in the digital age On the heels of US academic David Touve’s World Copyright Summit presentation, a panel of experts examined how the various creative industries are responding to the digital challenge, reports Anthea Sarris.

Across all sectors of the creative industries, shifting business models demand that all interests be balanced in order to retain and maintain creative value.

This was the dominant message from the panel of experts at the World Copyright Summit session ‘Creating value — future models for creative industries’.

Reacting to the presentation of David Touve, Assistant Professor of Business at Washington and Lee University, moderator Andrew Orlowski flagged up the notion that “there is an enormous amount of money to be captured by the industry that it is not currently doing”. Orlowski, who is Executive Editor of the online news service The Register, then asked the panel if this were too optimistic a vision.

Reinhard Buscher, Head of Unit for Support for Industrial Innovation at the European Commission’s DG Enterprise and Industry, emphasised the need to understand the concept of creative industries and recognise the diverse range of economic activities represented. He identified three sectors — the current “driving forces” within the creative industries — as publishing and music, software and design.

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In contrast to the more mature markets of publishing and music, Büscher highlighted the trending markets within the creative sector. “The fastest growing industries in Europe are powered by technology,” he said, citing gaming and software as examples. He added that these new sectors illustrate the convergence of “content, distribution and technologies”.

According to Büscher, “The question is not so much which sub-sectors are contributing the most to the creative industries, but what will be the outcome of the new markets and industries as a result of this trend to convergence”.

Competing with free Michel Lambot, co-President of European independent label body Impala and co-Founder of Brussels-based music company PIAS, drew a parallel between TV operators and ISPs, pointing out that ISPs currently have no responsibility for the type of content they carry. He said: “We believe that, by giving a certain level of responsibility to the ISPs for the type of content they are bringing in to homes…, it will help the creative industries to justify new models like Deezer or Spotify. You can’t fight against free.”

This suggestion was picked up by Hanns-Peter Frentz, Director of BPK Photo Agency, who reported that the image industry has been building on the massive use of images online. “Everyone on the internet needs images,” Frentz said, “but pictures are different from other creative content as they are normally not sold to consumers. They are part of products from other commercial companies who use pictures in their digital products. Millions of photos are needed and used every year, and it’s growing.”

For Frentz, the image industry has tried to combat the use of pictures without authorisation by introducing different ways to access content. “We have very different kinds of licensing,” he said, outlining the three main access models — rights-managed, royalty-free and micro-payment — offered

by Europe’s 1,000-strong photo-agency industry.

Paying for it The newspaper industry — which consists of 5,200 titles in Europe alone — has also been dealing with the combination of free content on the internet and declining sales for physical products and is experimenting with different models. “The consensus in the industry is that we have to go back to a paid model [online] and there is no doubt that, in the last years, giving content for free could have been a mistake,” said Valdo Lehari Jr, Vice-President of the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the German media group Reutlinger General Anzeiger.

“There is no digital future without the analogue content from newspapers, magazines and broadcasters,” said Lehari, noting that the industry is working on copyright and paid-content strategies, on the understanding that payment can only be expected in return for added value. “You cannot charge consumers if you don’t bring added value,” he continued. Lehari also challenged the notion of free, pointing out that “people pay for access to online content — pictures, music, etc — with their private data. This is, for me, the real discussion.”

Part of the solution The new business models that work often combine a number of factors. The French digital music platform Deezer offers various options to consumers, ranging from free and paid services to a bundled package with mobile operator Orange. Deezer has reached 1.2 million paid subscribers in a single year, mostly as a result of the bundling offer with Orange.

“There is definitely a huge value for consumer in digital music,” said Deezer CEO Axel Dauchez, adding that his company’s offers are constantly fine-tuned to react to market demand.

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Dauchez reported that Deezer is contributing $50 million to rights holders and the music industry, which is more than the US service Pandora pays out to rights holders. The revenues from streaming services in France are growing, Dauchez added, and will start to offset the decline in physical sales by the end of 2011. “There is definitely a momentum, because now the services are delivering real value around the content,” he said. However, Dauchez warned that cloud services could represent a risk, as pricing points for these services are far lower than those charged by the streaming services.

For Katri Sipila, CEO of Finland’s authors’ society TEOSTO, the understanding of creativity as an experience, not a product, lies at the heart of all the creative industries. “To be able to promote diverse experiences in the future, we must safeguard remuneration for creators,” she said. “Collecting societies want to be part of the solution, not the problem, so we really want to co-operate with technology platforms, providers, ISPs and services like Deezer, and provide them with simple legal licensing solutions.”

She added that, in Europe, repertoires are still very fragmented and admitted that this could create issues for services. “The Commission did not help us with their 1995 recommendation, and now we are waiting to find out solutions for the re-aggregation of repertoire,” she said.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 11:40 AM

Viewpoints: The role of ISPs in the creative eco-system Gavin Bonnar, Christophe Depreter, Alain Lauzon, Paul Hitchman, Stephen Navin, Eddie Schwartz

From left to right : Stephen Navin, Gavin Bonnar, Christophe Depreter, Alain Lauzon, Paul Hitchman, Eddie Schwartz

Speakers: Gavin Bonnar, lawyer and author of “The Artists' Charter” (Ireland) Christophe Depreter, CEO, SABAM (Belgium) Paul Hitchman, Co-Founder and CEO, Media Service Provider (MSP) (UK) Alain Lauzon, member of AGAMM (Accès Gratuit à la Musique est un Mythe) / General Manager, SODRAC (Canada) Eddie Schwartz, songwriter and producer / President, SAC (Songwriters Association of Canada) (Canada) Moderator: Stephen Navin, CEO, Music Publisher Association (UK)

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Panel calls for new rules of engagement for ISPs The World Copyright Summit saw a panel of rights holders and experts revisit the arguments surrounding the role that ISPs should play in the creative industries’ value chain, with many voices suggesting they should, and could, do more, reports Nicola Slade.

Five experts and representatives of rights holders were called upon to deliver their views and positions on the role of internet service providers (ISPs) in the digital economy during the World Copyright Summit session entitled ‘The role of ISPs in the creative ecosystem’.

Taking the stage were Gavin Bonnar, Irish barrister and author of ‘The Artists Charter’ (http://www.theartistscharter.org/); Christophe Depreter, CEO of Belgian authors’ society SABAM; Paul Hitchman, co-Founder and CEO of Playlouder and Media Service Provider (MSP); Alain Lauzon, General Manager of Canadian society SODRAC; and Eddie Schwartz, President of the Songwriters’ Association of Canada (SAC). Each speaker was given five minutes to present his arguments in a session moderated by Stephen Navin, CEO of the UK’s Music Publishers Association.

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With the exception of Hitchman, who argued a balanced viewpoint from the perspective of ISPs and the content industries, the speakers ferociously criticised internet providers for neglecting to engage with rights owners and for continuing to peddle the notion that they are “mere conduits” in the digital marketplace.

Bonnar started the session by expressing his particular concerns: “We are all direct or indirect beneficiaries of the output of the creative industries. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the focus of the last 10 years has been on internet companies and service providers. And I’m pretty sure that it isn’t an inaccurate statement to say that artists have lost out.”

Citing a report published by Terra Consultants in 2008, Bonnar went on to deliver some sobering facts — facts, he stated, that will continue to have “calamitous consequences.” “In 2008, the EU’s creative industries experienced retail revenue losses of €10 billion and the loss of 185,000 jobs owing to piracy, particularly digital piracy.”

Bonnar also used the opportunity to quote ‘Point 9’ of his self-penned ‘Artists’ Charter’: “While our industry has collapsed to annual revenues of less than $20 billion, the ISP industry has more than doubled its revenues in the last five years to $250 billion, due in large part to infringement of our artistic works.”

Market captured SABAM’s Depreter added weight to Bonnar’s argument by explaining that his collection society’s turnover has been constantly falling since 2002, due to declining mechanical revenues on the back of increased piracy. He directly and openly criticised the ISPs: “I can tell you that our online collections are not exceeding €1 million a year. Has the market disappeared? No. Never have music and movies been so intensively consumed. The market has been moved and captured by another type of company.”

Depreter suggested that, because access providers are like cable networks in that they carry everything, licensing ISPs in the same way as cable services should be considered. He added that SABAM has been exploring the possibility of offering a licensing framework to ISPs. “Pay attention!” he added. “I am not advocating a blanket license or calling for the legalisation of pirate downloads. I’m just saying that, on the issue of the distribution of works, there is a responsibility that is not exempted by the E-Commerce Directive. Let’s try to solve this problem and, after that, we will try to address the issue of pirate downloads.”

Bundling solution?

Despite ongoing frustration with the network providers, it was agreed that a better relationship needs to develop. It was at this point that Hitchman, who has extensive experience of working with ISPs including Eircom in Ireland and TDC in Denmark, was able to shed light on more recent developments.

Hitchman’s company, MSP, helped Eircom to devise and build a new music offering, which was accompanied by a ‘graduated response’ policy against serial file-sharers. “ISPs are also facing challenges,” he said. “One has to bear in mind that they also exist in a very challenging market. It’s a mature market and therefore margins have being squeezed and they suffer from a lot of churn. The average acquisition cost can easily be more than €200 per customer.”

As a result, Hitchman added, ISPs have a challenge to attract and retain customers and differentiate themselves from their competitors. “There is a big need for them to grow their average revenue per user and their margins,” he explained. “Across the world, ISPs are realising the way to do so is to bundle content and services with access.”

For Hitchman, this opens the door for content services to be licensed to ISPs, so that they can offer additional services to their customers. He concluded by saying: “As I see it, there’s a huge need for precedent as set by TDC and Eircom. Others are exploring the same paths. They need the support and the progressive licensing of the music industry and they need to work with them to offer services to their customers. It’s the only way that the history of conflict between the two industries can be flipped and become one of partnership instead.”

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Free access SODRAC’s Lauzon agreed that there should be a licensing solution with which ISPs can engage in order to move the digital market forward. But once again, it was stated that the creative industries are in a difficult position because “the concept of free access has created a deep distortion of reality”.

Lauzon is part of L’AGAMM — L’Accès Gratuit à la Musique est un Mythe (Free access to music is a myth), a coalition of music-related rights holders in French-speaking Canada that has been lobbying for more onus to be put on ISPs. He reported that rights holders in Canada have tried to find commercial solutions to the problem of unlimited and unlicensed file-sharing, but with limited results.

There is an irony, Lauzon pointed out, in that “access is not free when the majority of households are paying substantial sums to the ISPs each month” for broadband. He noted that most governments around the world favour consumers’ access to broadband to the detriment of the content industry, leading to serious concern about the future viability of the creative industries.

For the coalition, a possible remedy, Lauzon suggested, is to set up “compensatory remuneration” based on a percentage of ISPs revenues and extend the private-copying regime to all recording devices and formats. This is currently not the case in Canada and in many other countries. “This compensation [scheme] is in no ways an authorisation to illegally download content and is not a global license,” Lauzon added. “Besides, we view it as a transitory measure that would help bring back some sort of balance in the market and could be an incentive for ISPs to fight more efficiently against piracy.”

Lauzon ended his presentation with a call to all parties to discuss these issues and find solutions and viable business models. “Not one stakeholder can take the decision to opt out from this debate without compromising the creation of a viable ecosystem,” he concluded.

Pilot project SAC’s Schwarz — the final speaker to take to the stage — announced that Canada has found its filesharers to be potential allies. He reported that his collection society had undertaken a survey to which the respondents had supplied some surprising answers. “Of families in Canada with internet access and teenage children, 72% of them would pay a license fee for sharing music,” he revealed. “Of the file-sharers themselves, that figure comes in at roughly 70% – that’s in the demographic of 15- to 35years-old.”

He continued: “What I think is interesting is that you might come to the conclusion — and I’m not sure I’m ready to jump there — that coming up with a solution to license the end-user and get around safeharbour provisions for ISPs might eliminate 70% of piracy. And even if the numbers are wrong, a licensing system might eliminate 50%.”

Schwarz also revealed that those polled said they would pay $5 per month for a license, which would result in a $400 million annual revenue for the music industry. “It’s a significant pool of money,” he observed.

That research is expected to be published in the very near future. “What we are hoping to do is to put together a pilot project in Canada to see if these numbers hold up,” Schwarz said.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 12:40 PM

Keynote Conversation: In my world… The future of books Arnaud Nourry interviewed by Liz Bury

Keynote speaker: Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and CEO, Hachette Livre (France) Interviewed by: Liz Bury, Insight and Data Development Editor, Newsquest Specialist Media (UK) Link to: [Video and Blog article]

[Photos]

Nourry: ‘Copyright is fit for the digital age’ Hachette Livre CEO Arnaud Nourry expressed the belief that the book-publishing industry is well positioned to face the new digital challenges in his World Copyright Summit keynote, reports Rémi Bouton.

It was a display of confidence in the future of books from one of the world’s leading book-publishing houses. In his World Copyright Summit keynote, Arnaud Nourry, Hachette Livre Chairman and CEO, expressed his faith in the future of printed books — and his belief that the digital world would be beneficial to his industry.

In his keynote conversation with British journalist Liz Bury, Nourry outlined the digital strategy of his company — part of French media giant Lagardère — which include a partnership deal with Google to digitise Hachette’s catalogue, maintaining high-level pricing points for electronic books and chasing pirated copies of e-books.

Nourry said the books industry had the opportunity to learn from how the music industry had handled the digital challenge and thus avoid making the same mistakes. “It was far easier for the books industry to come 10 years after the music industry,” he said. “My vision is that the music industry started to react very negatively in front of the digital transformation. I remember that, at the time they decided to fight against Napster. They eventually won the battle but then thousands of websites came in the same context.”

For Nourry, the music industry “has lost a key battle, which is all about the value of the content”. He pointed out that Apple now calls the shots, even though its business is to sell devices, not content.

Digitally active “We tried not to do the same in the book-publishing industry,” Nourry added. “We decided, especially in America, to be extremely active in the digital field, to digitise books in partnership with the different players — Amazon, Google, Barnes & Nobles, etc — and by doing that, we managed to provide 10 platforms in the US [offering] the entire catalogues of publishers. That created a fantastic experience for consumers. They can find all the books they want in digital format at affordable prices. And that’s why the market has taken off and it’s good for everyone.”

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As a result, Nourry explained, the US market is now mature, with one in five books sold in the country now being electronic, against 5%-6% a year ago. The UK market, he added, appears to be following the US trajectory. However, the digital-publishing market is barely starting in continental Europe, including France, where the e-book “is almost non-existent”.

But the digital campaign started many years ago, when publishers like Hachette approached authors and agents, first in the US and then elsewhere, to ensure that they would have the rights to their ebooks. “In most contracts that were drafted 10 or 15 years ago, there was nothing written about digital books,” Nourry said. “That was the first step. The second step, as an industry, was that we decided to go with DRM [Digital Rights Management] to make sure we could control the number of files — not because we want to damage the users’ experience but because we have a liability towards our authors, which is to pay them their royalties based on the number of copies sold.”

The third step was to ensure that there would be a diversity of digital retailers to sell the books. “When the e-book started to emerge two years ago in America, it was quite clear that the main retailers — Amazon, Barnes and the others — were planning to discount heavily books in digital format to make sure that they built market share in the device market,” Nourry said. “They make more money selling a device at a high price than they make on books. As an industry, separately, we had the vision [to see] that, if we were to accept that [situation], we would deeply destroy the value of the entire industry.”

Not loss-leaders In order to ensure the legitimate market was not competing unfairly with free downloads, publishing houses such as Hachette intensified their fight against online piracy. For example, Hachette signed a deal with operator Attributor to help identify potential pirate copies of books online. “They report to us every week and send e-mails to these websites,” Nourry said. “So far, in 95% of these instances, the files were taken down, so it has been quite successful. Given the size of the e-book market in the US, it is difficult to believe that piracy has taken any significant share. I am quite optimistic that we have moved in the right direction.”

For publishers, the pricing of digital books is another crucial issue. In France, pricing is by law the prerogative of the publisher, even in the digital world, and Nourry had no qualms about admitting that this is something about which he feels strongly. He said he would rather not see books becoming loss-leading products in their digital format, and is therefore pushing hard for high pricing points for ebooks.

For example, when the best-selling autobiography of Ted Kennedy was released, the online platforms planned to sell the digital format for $9,99, which Hachette refused to do. Instead, the publishing house requested that it be sold for the same price as in print — $28.

“We told all the big retailers, ‘Sorry, guys, you will not have that book because the value of that book is $28 and we don’t want it to sell at $9.99’,” Nourry explained. “Apple then came with the iPad and asked publishers if they wanted a partnership with them to create an iBook store and we said that we wanted to do it, but we wanted to do it on terms which gave publishers control of the pricing. And so far it has been very successful, for two reasons: one, the market exploded in America, so it did not prevent consumers at all from adhering to the digital market; and second, we have created diversity on the retailers’ side.”

Taming Google Then the Google situation erupted, whereby the internet giant started a library programme consisting of scanning books in American public libraries without permission from their publishers.

“Because of fair use, the American law is flexible enough to let them [Google] think that they can do that, although publishers in America think they cannot,” Nourry said. “We publishers, especially in Europe, have never accepted that Google could have access to our books and, down the road, in 10 years from now, have a library of, say, 20 million digitised books that they would make available to consumers.

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[The books are] supposed to be out of print or in the public domain but, in fact, when you check the Google database, you find very recent commercial books too. It is just not acceptable for publishers and for authors.”

He added: “We have tried the legal way against Google and, in America, this is very expensive. And then we tried a settlement, the resolution of which is still pending. And in Europe, we opposed the American settlement and we, Hachette, started negotiations with Google to find a way out of that situation.”

However, Nourry believes that Google can be “a very good tool” for authors and publishers to promote books. “And we need Google in the marketplace alongside Amazon and Apple, because we need diversity,” he said. “But they have to accept our rules. When they decided to create their e-book store in the US in December, they suddenly became very flexible because they needed Hachette’s most recent books, and the balance of power had changed. They needed copies of the files to create their bookstores and came to Paris and accepted the concept that they had to ask for permission before scanning any book. And that’s the heart of the agreement we are in the process of signing.”

Strong principles For Nourry, one of the risks is that a too rapid growth of the digital market could destabilise the network of traditional bookstores that are crucial to the economy of the printed word.

“Books are not consumer products like any other — [they are] about culture, ideas and democracy,” he said. “We publish 17,000 books every year in the world. To achieve that, we need a huge diversity of bookstores and retailers and we need to have these rules to make sure this diversity will not be killed by any of the major internet players.”

He added: “It is now a different world and we should not underestimate the power of these major companies and the fact that their business model is, in many cases, not really compatible with what books represent. On the other hand, my experience as CEO of Hachette is that, when we are strong with the principles — copyright, prices and diversity of retailing — even companies much bigger than [us] are forced to come around the table and negotiate with us, which is what we did even with Google.”

New players Nourry also suggested that the evolution of the digital market would change the balance between authors and publishers. Hachette, like other publishers, has been in the process of clearing with authors and their agents new contracts incorporating digital rights.

“We need to have friendly conversations with authors to make sure that the transformation from print to digital is done under balanced conditions for both sides — balanced, meaning that authors should be remunerated in digital in a way that does not diminish their remuneration,” he said. “Because we are just at the beginning of that process — the business models and the prices could evolve — it will not be an easy discussion, but in most countries where Hachette operates, authors know that this is the spirit of the talks.”

Nourry came across as optimistic and confident about the future of the book-publishing industry and the survival of publishers. He said he did not believe that self-published books would become the norm, pointing out that publishers offer a specific service and have a particular function in the food chain, not least covering production and promotional costs.

“We are just at the beginning of that digital transformation and, yes, many other players like agents, authors, retailers and some technology companies are looking at our business models and trying to grab a piece of the value,” he said. “Let’s think of the publisher also as the banker of the system. We finance the entire process of creating books. So if you think of the transformation towards digital, what will disappear? Manufacturing and distributing. That’s it. Everything else remains the same. Of course, if you are an author, you can write a book and put it online, but does [that] create a success?

Once a year, in the world, it does. And that’s where a publisher has business.”

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Copyright fit for purpose Neither does Nourry see a need for seriously altering the existing copyright legislation. “Copyright is fit for the digital age,” he stated. “What we see in digital mature markets like the US or the UK is that it does work. We have a few questions on the table — orphan works, out of print works — and there is a need to have changes in copyright laws in many countries to address these issues. As far as commercial works available, I don’t see any major reason for altering the copyright laws and environment because it works.”

He is equally bullish about the future of the physical market for books. I don’t think the physical book will disappear,” he said. “In my own projections, if one third of the book market — or even half — becomes digital, this will be the maximum. So we publishers still have half of the business in our hands [in] the traditional way. So I do not see risks for the publishers to disappear in the middle term.

Now are we [are being] attacked by many other players? Yes, we are. Am I nervous about that? Not that much.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 14:00 PM

Focus Session: From Gutenberg to the eBook…

The changing economics of the printed word Paul Aiken, Jean-Claude Bologne, Liz Bury, Aline Côté, Pirjo Hiidenmaa, Simon Juden, Michael Tamblyn

From left to right : Liz Bury, Paul Aiken, Jean‐Claude Bologne, Aline Côté, Pirjo Hiidenmaa, Simon Juden, Michael Tamblyn

Speakers: Paul Aiken, Executive Director, Authors Guild / Vice President, The Authors Registry (USA) Jean-Claude Bologne, author / President, SGDL (France) Aline Côté, Chair Copyright Committee, ANEL (Association nationale des éditeurs de livres) / CEO, Editions Berger (Canada) Pirjo Hiidenmaa, President, EWC (European Writers’ Council) (Finland) Simon Juden, former CEO, British Publishers Association / Head of Public Policy, Pearson (UK) Michael Tamblyn, EVP of Content, Sales & Merchandising, Kobo (Canada) Moderator: Liz Bury, Insight and Data Development Editor, Newsquest Specialist Media (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Why the future reads well for e-books A World Copyright Summit panel of publishing, licensing and retailing experts confirmed that the new digital economy for written works has resulted in a radical transformation of the printed-word economy. Anthea Sarris reports.

The book-publishing industry is the most recent creative sector to have come to terms with the new digital reality.

At the World Copyright Summit session ‘From Gutenberg to the eBook… the rapidly changing economics of the printed word’, a group of publishing experts admitted that, with the rise of e-books and e-readers, authors and book publishers are now measuring the full extent of the digital revolution and its impact on consumers’ reading habits. Two issues were dominant: the first was the opportunity for publishers to create value in the online world; the second was the need to adjust copyright law to make it fully relevant to the new age.

According to Simon Juden, Head of Public Policy for British media group Pearson, publishers have adjusted to the digital world mostly because their core competence remains the same. “One of the things that publishers do is reject content, then refine what’s left and then work to bring that content to audiences,” Juden said. “Those core competences are as relevant online as they were in the analogue world.”

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However, in terms of creating value in the new digital economy, Juden believed that “there were many opportunities to go far beyond what we have been able to do to date and engage with audiences in new ways”. But he noted that there were differences for fiction and non-fiction works. Taking the example of books about legal cases, he observed that most of that content is now available online and that publishers could add value in “the curation and presentation of content, and in understanding the needs of the consumers”.

Device-driven business Aline Côté, CEO of Editions Berger and chair of the Copyright Committee at ANEL, French-speaking Canadian association of book publishers, reported that one of the ways publishers in Québec reacted to the new economy was by “creating an aggregator” of digital content to ensure that books would be electronically distributed.

Advances in technology have indeed provided the sector with a range of game-changing products and services. Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild in the US, delivered a succinct history of the impact of e-ink devices on the market, from the introduction of the Sony Reader in late 2006, through Amazon’s Kindle in 2007 to the impact of the iPad in 2010.

“When Amazon introduced the Kindle, they said it would sell books in a different way, including at a low price. E-books would be available at $9.99 and Amazon managed to do that by losing money as they sold books,” Aiken said. As a result, Amazon quickly annexed 90% of the US e-book market.

The major change in the market, according to Aiken, was when Apple launched its iBooks store on the “agency model”, under which publishers set the price, Apple takes a 30% agent commission and there is no discounting. “Five of the six big publishers in the US quickly jumped on this agency model, because they don’t want a future where Amazon controls the e-books market, and it worked beautifully for them,” Aiken said.

He added that Amazon’s share of the trade e-book market is now down to 55%, followed by Barnes & Noble with roughly 25% and Apple with 10%-15%. “The agency model has been a powerful weapon to defeat the winner-take-all economics that prevails otherwise online,” Aiken remarked.

Pricing issues Reflecting on the investigation of publishers by the competition authorities, Aiken expressed stupefaction. “It baffles me that the competition authorities are looking at the agency model as a bad thing for readers and publishers,” he said, pointing out that all publishers would end up being aggregated by one single company if Amazon got its way.

Michael Tamblyn, EVP of Content, Sales and Merchandising at Canada’s books online service Kobo, concurred: “The agency model creates a much more level playing field for retailers wanting to compete in that space. And it allows retailers who had single-digit market shares to grow significantly.

The other side of this is that it forces publishers to think in a more nuanced way about how to price works in the market. It is a new thing for North America, but it is not a new thing for Europe.”

This particular point was picked up by author Jean-Claude Bologne, President of France’s SGDL, which represents literary authors. Even if the digital-books market is in its infancy in France, publishers and platforms have been careful not to discount the value of books — a process that was enhanced in May 2011, when the French Parliament voted in a law in which publishers set the price of e-books and discounting is limited.

“We won’t have the same troubles about hard discount that some other countries have been going through,” Bologne said, although he admitted that he was unsure as to whether the French model would survive over time.

The discussion then turned to copyright and its role and relevance to book publishing. Editions Berger’s Côté identified copyright as a significant area for improvement in Canada. “The priority for us right now is getting our copyright law on a par with other countries,” she said. “By making sure that we can protect rights, we can then establish a base level of value that can then be enhanced with all the other possibilities of the digital market.”

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Confused situation The new digital paradigm is also changing the nature of the relationship between authors and publishers, Bologne suggested. “Most authors who have old contracts will retain their digital rights,” he said. “This means there will be a lot of negotiations to secure digital rights for old books in the years to come.”

Unlike other sectors of the creative industry, the book-publishing industry has not yet been affected by major piracy problems. As a result, the notion of copyright laws as a means of protection for rights holders is not yet prevalent among book publishers and authors, said Pirjo Hiidenmaa, President of the European Writers’ Council (EWC). However, she challenged the audience to consider whether contracts, rather than copyright, are the most significant issue facing authors: “Authors are confused in this situation. They don’t know what type of contracts they can sign. There is a huge concentration in the books business and authors don’t have enough negotiating power in this environment.”

Pearson’s Juden agreed that the issues facing the book-publishing industry have less to do with copyright than with market forces. “Copyright is not broken,” Juden stated. “That said, the process of clearing rights is and can be difficult and cumbersome.”

One of the solutions suggested by Juden to make licensing easier would be to use metadata to inform users of the set of rights attached to works. “You can imagine a fairly basic level of this where just the rights holders were identified – and that would be a great start,” he said. “But to really work, you want a layer under that that would involve some level of collective management, or some system of micropayment, so that for the user it seems like a seamless experience. And it would make no sense to have a UK or European system. This is a global problem that requires a global solution.”

On the issue of piracy, Aiken reported that the US — the world’s most mature e-book market — is starting to see growing e-book piracy on exactly the same infrastructure that has supported illegal filesharing for music, video and games. “The same servers, spread around the globe, are used now for e-books,” Aiken said. “You can BitTorrent books now. It is a real present and growing threat.”

Hiidenmaa then challenged delegates to consider what constitutes the greatest danger for the publishing industry: e-book piracy or significant changes in reading culture and habits. “Which one is a bigger threat?” she asked. “New readers, such as school-aged children and young adults, have much more to do today than read books. So which one is more likely to affect the revenues of publishing companies and authors?”

Authors as publisher The discussion ended with an examination of the impact of the new technology-enabled distribution models. SGDL’s Bologne acknowledged the temptation for authors to avoid a system that is cumbersome and to try to publish books directly. “This is even more tempting on the internet, especially as there are services that offer authors [the opportunity] to self-publish,” he explained. “But the biggest problem now is selection. One platform offers 8,000 new books per year, which is more than any established publisher. So it can be tempting for a lot of people, although few professional authors will do it.”

This view was challenged by Tamblyn, who said that self-published authors constitute a growing segment of Kobo’s business. Reporting that about 7% of units sold worldwide are now by selfpublished authors, he said: “This has been a growing business for us and we have to consider how we can engage with them, knowing that it will be quite different to the relationships we have with established publishers like Pearson.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 14:00 PM

Focus Session: Metadata standards The foundations of value Michel Allain, Maureen Cavan, Janifer Gatenby, Oliver Heckmann, Carl Inwood, Mark Isherwood, FX Nuttall

From left to right : FX Nuttall , Michel Allain, Maureen Cavan, Janifer Gatenby, Oliver Heckmann, Carl Inwood, Mark Isherwood

Speakers: Michel Allain, Deputy Director - Director of Organization and Information System, SACEM (France) Maureen Cavan, Executive Director, ACCESS COPYRIGHT (Canada) Janifer Gatenby, Research Integration and Standards, OCLC (Netherlands) Oliver Heckmann, Engineering Director, Google (Switzerland) Carl Inwood, Director of Content & Rights Metadata, Universal Music Group International (UK) Mark Isherwood, Secretariat, Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) (UK) Introduction and moderator: FX Nuttall, Business Intelligence Consultant, CISAC (France) Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Metadata: the foundation of the digital economy?

Experts explained at the World Copyright Summit that quality metadata is key to the development of successful digital businesses, Adrian Crookes reports.

While the creative industries continue to face up to the challenge of conducting their business digitally, they have been forced to re-evaluate the role and the importance of the data associated with transactions linked to content. Moreover, experts gathered at the World Copyright Summit argued during the session ‘Metadata standards – the foundations of value’ that the quality of metadata, coupled with the ability to communicate that data effectively through the supply chain, is the key to future business success.

“Good metadata is an investment. Only bad metadata is a cost,” explained Carl Inwood, Director of Content and Rights Metadata at Universal Music Group International in London, summing up the importance of the issue.

In fact, the creative industries, especially music, have been no stranger to metadata identifiers over the years — a fact underlined by CISAC’s Technology Intelligence Consultant FX Nuttal as he contextualised the issues involved at the start of the session. “Metadata is becoming increasingly important in societies’ operations,” Nuttall said. He added that metadata, which was initially implemented as a music-industry requirement, has now become a cross-industry issue.

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Recorded music companies operated the ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) system, while the publishers and collecting societies developed the ISWC (International Standard Works Code) system. They served the analogue world well, Nuttall argued, as did others, such as the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) and IPI (Interested Party Information).

Then along came digital, which brought with it a seismic shift in business model. Where once companies had produced high value from a relatively low volume of transactions, they now found themselves dealing with vastly higher volumes of transactions that each generated very low values.

And there were suddenly new intermediaries in the supply chain requiring new identifiers to be established, such as the ERN (Electronic Release Notification) and DSR (Digital Sales Report).

Common language Nuttall showed how the amount of data handled by a collecting society has risen exponentially with the advancement of digital. Typically in 2010, identification and payment processing would have been required for some 50 million musical works from a total of 1.8 billion download and 7.8 billion stream transactions.

The cost of manual processing — if it were possible — is unfeasible at €15 per work, Nuttall suggested, but reduces to a manageable €0.02 per work when fully automated. The works still likely to require manual matching sit in the so-called ‘long tail’. If these could be auto-matched, the typical society could save €1m a year in processing costs, he argued.

In the past, companies have viewed investment in identification systems as a cost, but things have evolved as the benefits of good metadata have become apparent. Maureen Cavan, Executive Director of Canadian copyright-licensing organisation Access Copyright, a collective management agency collecting from secondary uses of published works, said metadata provides “the reference that allows us to speak a common language between all of our stakeholders and, in that respect, it is vitally important. The better the metadata, the more automated the system and the faster the process.”

Cavan added that, in literary circles, stakeholders used to play “in their own little world”, but the changes in the ecosystems has forced them to adopt a more global view. “We have all recognised that, as the digital world develops, we are dealing more and more with material globally and less locally. So we need to speak internationally and we need to develop common standards and common languages to do that.”

And it is this common language between all stakeholders that the panellists agreed was becoming more and more important. Netherlands-based Janifer Gatenby, in charge of Research Integration and Standards at OCLC, put it succinctly when she said: “The challenge is to get the industry involved so that metadata is used coherently”. OCLC is a co-operative service and research organization connecting libraries globally through systems allowing them to locate, acquire, catalogue and lend library materials.

With millions of works used and searched around the world, the key to making the system work, according to Gatenby, is the value, quality and relevance of the identifiers. “Identifiers are shorthand for an indefinite ensemble of metadata,” she added.

Collegiate atmosphere One of the organisations tasked with ensuring coherence across the digital supply chain by assisting with the automated exchange of the different identification systems is DDEX (Digital Data Exchange).

“It designs your tax form for you to fill in,” explained DDEX COO Mark Isherwood. “In a digital world, the whole supply chain is thrown into chaos if an identifier is allocated incorrectly.”

DDEX — which regroups rights owners as well as technology firms — encourages all parties in the supply chain to solve the issues involved with automated message communication between them. “It is a very collegiate atmosphere, because they [DDEX members] all have problems that they want to be solved,” Isherwood said.

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“Without that, these sorts of developments would simply not be possible.”

DDEX regularly releases new sets of standards that those signing up to the organisation have developed to improve efficiency across the whole chain. This will become increasingly important as traditional roles change. Even now, “retailers selling across different media don’t want to deal with lots of different data from lots of different supply chains”, Isherwood explained. “And in five years, record companies and book publishers will all look very different themselves.”

Record companies will want the flexibility to be able to create e-books, videos and films, he suggested, while, conversely, book publishers may want to create sound recordings.

Key components For those tasked with identifying and processing, the application of standards to identification systems is to be welcomed. Michel Allain, Deputy Director and Director of Organisation and Information System at SACEM, explained how the French authors society had to deal with two billion lines of information relating to streams of music last year.

“As a pan-European society, identifiers and metadata are key components to help our matching,” Allain said. “Even processing 5% of those two billion streams costs a lot.”

Inwood explained that, at Universal, the amount of metadata involved in a single new release has been recently analysed. Where once a new release might have featured in a single product format such as vinyl or CD, each new release is now attached to a multitude of products, including video, apps and games. He revealed that one of the company’s key releases in 2010 required no less than 500 unique metadata elements. With over 50,000 releases a year, the scale of the issue is defined.

“Metadata has always been the problem child of any creative company,” Inwood added. “Increasingly, it is a core asset. Without [good data], we can’t generate sales or reach out to customers. We need to get it right first time: clear, concise, complete and correct. Going back to fix it will be an uphill struggle.

Out-of-the-gate correctness will be delivered by collaboration and ensure that we continue to discuss innovations and problems, and continue to engage in what we need, what is realistic and how we can deliver it.”

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Global approach Oliver Heckmann, Engineering Director at Google in Switzerland, underlined that, for online services like Google, good metadata is also an investment, while bad metadata is a cost. He admitted that, for user-generated content, the supplied metadata was “lousy” and that Google had developed a sophisticated system for identifying content in uploaded videos with its subsidiary YouTube.

“Two hours of new content are uploaded to YouTube every minute,” Heckmann revealed. And that meant that, if delegates wanted to watch every video uploaded to the site during the panel session, it would require their undivided attention for two months.

Hence the importance of the automated recognition of works relying on quality metadata. But even when content is identified by rights holders, Heckmann pressed for consistency in identification and rules policies. “Otherwise, we have to block [content], which means we can’t monetise and that means money lost across the supply chain,” he said.

The panel agreed that the dry subject of metadata has never been more important as all agents in the supply chain seek to auto-process the information they require in standardised formats in order to efficiently and cost effectively drive value for their business. It is increasingly becoming a crossindustry issue as music touches a wider range of products. Standardised, quality metadata is the glue that will hold everything together and the panellists argued that it needs a global, cross-industry approach.

“Whilst DDEX has brought together people involved across the digital-music supply chain, the problems that the digital-music supply chain has are exactly the same, in principle, as [the problems faced by] text or films or TV or games,” Isherwood observed. “We are now coming close to a point where those different organisations need to collaborate across all media types because, effectively, all digital retailers are selling music, films, TV shows, e-books, etc, and they will not want to receive the content and the metadata via lots of different supply chains. They will want to see them as close as possible together — and that’s the next stage of collaboration the media industry as a whole has to move towards.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 14:45 PM

Focus Session: Resale right What does it mean for artists, heirs and the art market?

Georgina Adam, Guillaume Cerutti, Helen Dolby, Meret Meyer, Andrew Potter, Christiane Ramonbordes

From left to right : Guillaume Cerutti, Helen Dolby, Georgina Adam, Meret Meyer, Andrew Potter, Christiane Ramonbordes

Speakers: Guillaume Cerutti, CEO, Sotheby’s France (France) Helen Dolby, Policy Officer, DG Internal Market and Services, European Commission (Belgium) Meret Meyer, Heir and Administrator, Marc Chagall Estate (France) Andrew Potter, Chair of the Board of Directors, DACS (UK) Christiane Ramonbordes, President of EVA (European Visual Artists) / Managing Director, ADAGP (France) Moderator: Georgina Adam, Art Market Editor at Large, The Art Newspaper / Art Market correspondent, Financial Times (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

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Re-sale right stirs heated debate A specialist panel at the World Copyright Summit expressed the wish that the resale right for visual artists could be made universal — despite concern about its impact on the art market, Juliana Koranteng reports.

Andrew Potter, Chair of the Board of Directors at the UK artists’ collecting society DACS, made a radical suggestion during the World Copyright Summit session, ‘Resale right — what does it mean for artists, heirs and the art market?’. He wondered whether artists should be seeking compensation similar to musicians’ performing rights, which would entitle them to a share of ticket sales to exhibitions of their works.

But Potter admitted that this was a topic for future discussion, as the issue of artists’ re-sale right, which entitles them to royalties when their works are resold, needs to be resolved first.

Potter was participating in a panel that questioned the benefits for artists and the art market of the resale right, and whether the current European Union re-sale right (ARR) Directive, adopted in 2001, was placing the region at a disadvantage compared to other countries such as the US and Switzerland, where there is no similar legislation. Moreover, is the Directive, as it stands, fostering artistic creativity?

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The European Commission, however, is in the process of reviewing the Directive to examine its effectiveness. Helen Dolby, Policy Officer in charge of these issues at the EC’s DG Internal Market and Services, explained that the Commission is scheduled to publish a report on the implementation and effects of the Directive in October. “We are conscious that there are varying issues on a marketby-market basis. So it is incumbent on us to work in good faith when analysing those issues,” she said.

As a preamble to the report, the DG Internal Market ran a consultation between December 2010 and March 2011. It received suggestions from more than 500 sources, Dolby said. Some 50% came from successors in title and heirs to artists’ estates and 35% from individual artists. Meanwhile, 80 submissions were received from related organisations, such as collecting societies.

Dolby also disclosed the profile of the submissions, revealing that 88% of them came from only three countries: France, the UK and Italy — three of the world’s biggest art markets. The remainder were received from nearly 19 other markets, including the US and Switzerland.

Benefit to creators According to Dolby, these submissions would help the Commission to come to a decision. The elements to be analysed in the report include the effects of the Directive on the competitiveness of the European art market with regards to those territories that do not have the ARR; its effects on fostering artists’ creativity; and its impact on the internal market and member states. “Based on the results of that report, the Commission should then go on to consider whether any proposals are needed — for example, to adapt the minimum threshold and the rates of the royalties,” Dolby said.

Despite the consultation, the panel’s consensus was that the Directive needed neither to be scrapped nor altered. Asked by moderator Georgina Adam, Editor-at-Large for The Art Newspaper and Art Market Correspondent for the Financial Times, if the ARR Directive delivered on its promises, Potter said that the legislation was working, despite DACS being one of the ARR Directive’s late adopters (the UK incorporated it into local law in 2006, but mainly for living artists). But even that was effective, Potter argued.

He also pointed out that, when the Directive comes into full effect in the UK next year, it would benefit th the heirs and families of dead artists as well. For example, the paintings of the 20 -century British artist Alan Lowndes sold for about €570 each when he died in the 1970s. But in 2008, one painting was resold for €42,000. The resale royalty would have been a boon for Lowndes’ widow and family.

“The UK government’s delay in fully implementing the right has cost artists an estimated €10 million,” Potter observed.

“We don’t need to change the Directive,” added Potter, who suggested the two watchwords regarding this issue are “fairness” and “proportion”. He said: “Some 90% of the members of music societies in Europe probably earn nothing or very little. It doesn’t mean you should take away their performing rights. After the legislation was introduced in the UK in 2006, the market increased by 11% in 20072008, but fell 19% in the US and also in Switzerland.”

Additional costs As CEO of auction-house giant Sotheby’s in France, Guillaume Cerutti represented the voice of art houses and dealers, often accused of benefiting from the sale of art works at the expense of artists.

Cerutti asked artists and their representatives to appreciate the role that dealers and auction houses play in boosting the value of art. “I recognise the artist’s value and the role of foundations that administer the works of deceased artists, but we also do our job very well, even supporting artists throughout their careers,” he added.

Cerutti said he supported the concept of resale rights, but is waiting for the conclusions of the EC review on the ARR. “I am not here today as an opponent to the ARR, which has first been implemented in France and is now fully part of the European landscape,” he told delegates. “But it would be regrettable if, following a general implementation in Europe since 2001, we could not revisit the terms of the re-sale right.”

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One of the points Cerutti raised was the inequality that might arise at international level if other regions fail to follow in the EU’s footsteps with resale-right provisions. He recalled that, in 2001, as the Directive was implemented, the EU was due to start a diplomatic lobbying around to world in an effort to convince other regions and countries to follow suit. “This is very important for artists, of course, but also because we have to be careful not to create an imbalanced market between the EU and other parts of the world,” he said.

Cerutti said he doubted the situation changed since 2001, noting that major art markets including Switzerland, the US, Hong Kong and China have not yet embraced the ARR. Cerutti stressed that the core business of auction houses such as Sotheby’s concerns works that sell for between €50,000 and €200,000, and that the ARR represents 3%-4% of the value of the work. He revealed that the ARR costs his company €1 million per year for a turnover of between €25-30 million.

“This is not a negligible sum,” he noted. “And our competitors are not on the same playing field.”

Major contribution Cerutti also questioned if the ARR really fosters creativity — one of the Commission’s goals — suggesting that it only benefits a small number of artists, mostly dead. He also highlighted the fact that the administrative costs required to manage the ARR are very high, even for an established player like Sotheby’s.

But Christiane Ramonbordes, Managing Director of France’s society ADAGP and President of EVA (European Visual Artists), challenged Cerutti, stating that ADAGP paid the proceeds of the ARR to over 2,000 artists in France, 30% of which were living artists. “This is quite a significant figure,” she said. Overall, ADAGP collected €7 million in 2010 from the ARR. Ramonbordes also explained that ADAGP, alongside auction houses, has created an ad hoc software programme to help it to manage the ARR as cost efficiently as possible. She then went on to consider the €1 million that Cerutti claimed the ARR cost Sotheby’s. “Compared to your turnover, this is not much,” she countered. “But for all the artists and the heirs who benefit from it, this is a major contribution.”

Potter said that DACS distributed royalties to over 2,000 artists with an average sum of €400. “We have not made ‘fat cats’ but, to an artist, even €100 is a form of recognition as well as a source of revenue,” he added. th Meret Meyer, heir and Administrator to the estate of legendary 20 -century artist Marc Chagall, insisted that whatever remuneration the resale right brings can make a difference. She explained that the four heirs of Chagall received royalties of €45,000 for the estate earlier this year. “The proceeds of the ARR may be a small sum, but it serves our daily administrative needs,” she said. “It allows us to have an office, to protect the works and to deal with the massive problem of piracy and counterfeiting — all that is expensive. The ARR is part of a package that is injected into a work that is essential.”

Meyer summed up the debate by stating that there were three parties involved in this discussion: the artists, without whom there would be no art; the auction houses and galleries, which bring the art to the buyers; and the rights societies. “We are all inter-dependent,” she said. “And therefore, it is important that we can find a system that works for all of us.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 14:45 PM

Focus Session: The benefits of copyright compliance Russia’s experience Mitko Chatalbashev, Maxim Dimitriev, Sergey Fedotov, Olga Kim, Nenad Marcec, Alexandre Polesitski

From left to right : Nenad Marcec, Mitko Chatalbashev, Maxim Dimitriev, Sergey Fedotov, Olga Kim, Alexandre Polesitski

Speakers: Mitko Chatalbashev, Director for European Affairs, CISAC/BIEM (Hungary) Maxim Dimitriev, Managing Director, First Music Publishing (Russia) Sergey Fedotov, Director General, Russian Authors Society RAO (Russia) Olga Kim, Deputy General Director, Legal Affairs, S.B.A. Music Publishing Ltd. (Russia) Alexandre Polesitski, Vice-President of National Association of Broadcasters / Director General, Europa Media Group (Russia) Moderator: Nenad Marcec, Chair of CISAC European Committee / Executive Director, HDS-ZAMP (Croatia) Link to: [Video and article]

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Russia works to improve copyright environment Historically seen as a lost cause because of its lack of appropriate copyright legislation, Russia is now making steady progress in its dealings with copyright-related issues, writes Nicola Slade.

As the biggest country in the Central and Eastern European region, Russia has the potential to lead by example on copyright issues. Its copyright legislation — once almost non-existent — has been strengthened to the benefit of creators and rights owners, according to experts speaking at the World Copyright Summit’s session ‘The benefits of copyright compliance — Russia’s experience’.

Moderator Nenad Marcec, Chair of CISAC’s European Committee and Executive Director of Croatian society HDS-ZAMP, noted that “significant progress has been made in Russia recently and copyright has been strengthened” in the country.

This new state of play is reflected in statistics for the region. Revenues collected by rights societies across Russia and the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries are up, according to figures presented by Hungary-based Mitko Chatalbashev, Director for European Affairs for CISAC and BIEM. According to Chatalbashev, royalty collections across the whole region (through some 40 authors’ societies) increased 6.4% in 2005, 16.4% in 2006, 24.4% in 2007 and 10.8% in 2008. Although they fell 7% to just over €312 million in 2009, Chatalbashev suggested that the drop could be explained by the financial crisis, rather than piracy.

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“The good news is that preliminary reports for 2010 show that collections are stabilised and there will probably be a limited growth,” Chatalbashev added.

Music accounts for over 80% of collections in CEE, while rights from dramatic repertoire make up the best part of the remaining 20%. The main source of income remains public performances, while mechanical collections are decreasing.

Lack of enforcement Chatalbashev reported that collective management organisations (CMOs) play a key role in Russia and Eastern Europe in terms of lobbying governments for stronger copyright laws, and ensuring these are enforced and that rights holders are remunerated. He noted that the real issue in the region, despite copyright legislation being strengthened in 2008, is the “huge gap between legal norm and implementation”, due mostly to “very ineffective enforcement” and a “lack of copyright culture”.

Olga Kim, Deputy General Director of Legal Affairs for music publisher SBA Music Publishing, stressed that neither legislation, nor the copyright framework is a problem in countries such as Russia — it’s the enforcement of rights that proves problematic. “Government institutions should help with enforcement,” she stated.

Kim said that the number of cases before the courts concerning intellectual property and copyright infringement is growing, but that the levels of compensation remain very low. “I can’t remember a case where the maximum compensation was awarded,” she added.

The panel admitted that Russia and CEE countries are at an interesting, albeit chaotic, juncture. It was claimed that mechanical revenues continue to slide at an alarming rate, while income from digital collections is failing to offset the decline. The marketplace, according to Sergey Fedotov, Director General of Russian authors society RAO, is not yet in a position to. However, RAO’s digital income represented less than 1% of the total amount collected by the society, while some 250 digital services have now been licensed in the country. “The business models do not generate yet enough income,” Chatalbashev noted.

More civilised Maxim Dimitriev, Managing Director of First Music Publishing, one of Russia’s leading independent music-publishing houses representing international catalogues such as Warner/Chappell and peermusic, acknowledged it is a complicated situation: “We need to increase the collections on digital repertoire. Now is the time to take those steps.”

Dimitriev reported that his society has withdrawn mechanical and digital rights from RAO and now administers them directly with the users. However, it continues to work with RAO for performing rights. “We are starting to work with RAO in the streaming and internet field and we think this could be a growing business,” Dimitriev added.

Overall, RAO’s Fedotov was keen, however, to establish that Russia has “structured its [authors’] societies to become more civilised” and that there was a great deal of potential for rights holders in Russia. But he conceded that “there is still an enormous amount of work to do”, with “only 10%-15% of “small users” (restaurants, etc) licensed in Moscow” for public performances. He conceded that more society representatives would be needed to help increase that figure, due to the size of the country.

Benefits for users Alexandre Polesitski, Vice-President of Russia’s National Association of Broadcasters and Director General of Europa Media Group, part of media giant Lagardère, acknowledged that real progress has been made in Russia in the past decade. He used the example of Madonna, whom his radio group had tried to persuade to come to Russia but in vain. “There were no fees, no royalties and rights were not protected,” Polesitski recalled. “Since then, she’s been in Russia twice because, among other things, artists do understand now that they are protected. Our interest is to show to the world community that, in Russia, it is now possible to pay for rights and to protect them.”

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Polesitski also reported that the radio sector, which comprises more than 200 radio stations, is now fully compliant with Russia’s performing-rights provisions and pays royalties to RAO. “We created an organisation representing all the sector and we can negotiate [with RAO] on behalf of the whole industry,” he said. “We have a mutual understanding with RAO and we implement more or less the same rates for all radio stations. For us, it is a much better situation: I can make business plans for the years to come knowing more or less how much I will pay. This is the main benefit for us as users.”

Polesitski also offered some insight into the growth of the online market in Russia, revealing that his radio network derives a mere 0.3% of its total revenues from online advertising on its websites. “In three years, we will be able to talk about achievements but, in this area [digital], it is too early to tell,” he said. “We need to show people that we will pay for rights. At the moment, we pay less than other countries and, maybe I’ll be the last person to ask this, but we need to ask if we can pay more!

Everyone in our industry wants to help.”

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 16:00 PM

Keynote Speech: Shaping the future for creative industries Culture and innovation: The Google approach Carlo d'Asaro Biondo, interviewed by: Robert Hooijer

Keynote speaker: Carlo d'Asaro Biondo, President, Southern and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa Operations, Google (France) Interviewed by: Robert Hooijer, Interim Director General, CISAC (France) Link to: [Video and article]

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Google pledges to support ‘alliance of science and art’ In his World Copyright Summit keynote presentation, Carlo d’Asaro Biondo said Google was keen to build trust with its major stakeholders, writes Adrian Crookes.

That Google was at the World Copyright Summit demonstrates how far the technology firm and rights holders have come in a short space of time.

In his keynote presentation, Carlo d’Asaro Biondo, the company’s President for Southern and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, outlined the different stages that Google and the creative industries have been through during the session ‘Shaping the future for creative industries — culture and innovation: the Google approach’.

At the first World Copyright Summit held in Brussels four years ago, there was certainly plenty of talk of Google, but it was at best apprehensive and at worst critical of the internet giant’s expanding activities. At this year’s Summit, d’Asaro Biondo acknowledged earlier anxieties and framed them as a standard reaction to the early stages of technological change. This fear phase is naturally replaced by a second phase, he suggested, which involves all parties “identifying the right way to go”. It is in this phase that “we all understand what to do better and what our roles should be,” he said.

For d’Asaro Biondo, this represents the journey that Google and the creator constituencies have travelled since that first World Copyright Summit in 2007 — a journey that has seen Google, in the face of some high-profile controversies, evolve its technologies “to make it more respectful of content”. He pointed to systems that have been introduced to remove infringing content and to advertising revenue-share programmes that have laid the foundations for more significant revenue capabilities in years to come.

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Building trust In the third phase of development — according to d’Asaro Biondo, the current phase — pragmatism is required on all sides. This involves working through issues by “having enough trust in each other to experiment together”. And that means “not to expect a result before we know how it works”.

As an example of Google’s involvement with the creative sector, d’Asaro Biondo cited several successful projects, such as digitising the Dead Sea Scrolls in partnership with Israel’s Antiquities Authority and the more recent Arts Project in collaboration with the world’s museums.

Google was committed to such projects, he said, to make the web “look less like the last 15 years” and to “help us understand who we are”. He added: “The web is not yet a mirror of the world’s cultural riches. Forty six per cent of web content is in English and we can’t afford to live in a world that will end up looking Anglo-American.”

He assured his audience that, in mining what the world had to offer, Google intended to protect content and limit piracy, working in partnership with content owners in full respect of their rights.

There was a long-term commitment, he said, to financial and technological investment to support the “alliance of science and art”. “We want to help artists and publishers reach new audiences,” he concluded.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 16:20 PM

Panel Discussion: Building bridges between creators and the digital generation Jean-Jacques Arjoon, Richard Charkin, Penny Grubb, Keith Harris, Helienne Lindvall, Horacio Maldonado, Klaus Thymann

From left to right : Keith Harris, Jean‐Jacques Arjoon, Richard Charkin, Penny Grubb, Helienne Lindvall, Horacio Maldonado, Klaus Thymann

Speakers: Jean-Jacques Arjoon, author, composer / Secretary, PACSA (Pan-African Composers and Songwriters Alliance) (Mauritius) Richard Charkin, Executive Director, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK) Penny Grubb, writer / Chair, ALCS (UK) Helienne Lindvall, songwriter / columnist, The Guardian (Sweden) Horacio Maldonado, film director / Secretary General, DAC (Argentina) Klaus Thymann, photographer and film-maker / Member of the Board of Directors, DACS (Denmark) Moderator: Keith Harris, Head of Performers Affairs, PPL (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

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Creators prepare to cross the digital generation gap A new approach is required to bridge the digital divide and connect creators with a new generation of consumers, agreed an expert panel at the World Copyright Summit, Anthea Sarris reports.

The digital generation’s greatest connection is not with the creators of the content they consume, but with the platforms and devices that deliver that content to them. What does this loss of connection and recognition mean for writers, composers, photographers and filmmakers? And what can be done to bridge the digital divide?

Representatives from across the creative industries addressed these issues and reflected on the attitudes of the digital generation during the World Copyright Summit session ‘Building bridges between creators and the digital generation’, presented by CISAC in partnership with the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO).

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In his opening remarks, Olav Stokkmo, CEO of IFRRO, emphasised the shared values held by CISAC and IFRRO. “We are committed to finding innovative solutions to make more content available to more people within a legal framework. I am convinced we need to do more. We need to work faster to meet the challenges of the digital marketplace,” Stokkmo said.

The session started with a video in which representatives of the digital generation discussed how they understood copyright, content, access and remuneration for creators. Responding to the video was a panel of creators from different disciplines. Moderator Keith Harris, Head of Performers’ Affairs for the UK society PPL, kicked off the discussion by saying that, “in times of economic recession, governments tend to cut back on the creative industries. So the question that I’d like most politicians to ask themselves is when you think about historical famous individuals, or when you think about people who represent most countries and their creativity, do we think about accountants or are we more likely to think about musicians, painters and writers? The creative industries tend to outlast business fads” Value in content The greatest concern for author and composer Jean-Jacques Arjoon, Secretary of PACSA, the PanAfrican Composers and Songwriters Alliance, was the fact that the digital generation had little awareness of authors and composers. “In this context, I see that authors and composers — those who are at the origin of the chain of cultural production — are completely ignored,” said Arjoon, who hails from Mauritius.

However, book publisher Richard Charkin, Executive Director of Bloomsbury Publishing, publishers of JK Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, and author Penny Grubb were heartened by what they saw as an intuitive awareness of the value of copyright and a willingness to pay for quality content. “They seem to understand the value of copyright rather better than some big technology companies,” Charkin observed.

“I was quite encouraged by the film,” Grubb added. “I was particularly encouraged by their intuitive awareness of the value of content. I do see that as something that the big corporations sometimes forget. The value is not in the format or the device. The Kindle in itself is not a very attractive proposition. The value is in the content. I like the idea that people realise that they are paying for quality.”

For songwriter and Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall, the film was “encouraging” but totally at odds with the reactions she receives when she writes about copyright. “When I write about compensation for artists, I usually get abuse,” she joked.

For film director Horacio Maldonado, who is also Secretary General of Argentina’s society DAC, the video highlighted a failure on the part of the creative industries to effectively communicate with the digital generation. “There must be something that we have a problem communicating,” Maldonado reflected. “They see themselves as just consumers, rather than pirates. But I think we have to explain more what we do.”

What not to do This sentiment that was echoed by London-based Danish photographer Klaus Thymann in reference to the “drag and drop” copying of photographs on social-networking sites, which “get disseminated in the digital landscape”.

“I don’t have a problem if someone uses one of my pictures on their blog,” added Thymann, who is also member of the Board of Directors of the UK’s visual-art society DACS. “But when you scale that up and get a network of millions of people and my pictures are part of that network, that network has a commercial value and then my pictures have a commercial value. But I am not getting any of that.

The distributors of content profit from that network through advertising, but none of that comes back to me as a visual artist. And I find that wrong.”

Asked by Harris how the panel felt about the way the creative industries have reacted to the new digital environment, Thymann observed that “the track record of the music industry has not been very good”, but praised the book-publishing industry for their attempts to get things right in the digital environment.

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Grubb added that there was a lot to learn from the music industry, “not least because there are directions music went that we need not to go”. For Grubb, the biggest issue is the lack of control about the use of content, especially music. “Music is used to sell devices rather than sell content,” she said.

“The books industry was quite lucky,” Charkin agreed, “because we did not have DRM-free digital copies of our books circulating on the networks — mostly because we did not have digital copies of books — or [were] threatened by a Napster from day one. But we are not doing as well as we should be. We are finding it very hard to clear rights going backwards in time, to negotiate fair royalties… But the biggest problem is that the publishing cycle of a book is a year. We have a spring list and an autumn list. This is ridiculous. We now have to work in terms of hours and minutes, not in terms of months and years.”

Interacting with consumers Lindvall said that the unfortunate spread of piracy to other sectors has resulted in greater solidarity across the creative industry. “For the music industry, it has helped our voice,” she added. “As a musician, I felt that this was one of the industries that is not really honorable, but with authors, for example, when Google started uploading their works, there was an immediate reaction from the media and the public, who thought it was completely unfair. And I thought that more honorable art forms would get into the debate and talk about these issues.”

Maldonado said that the task of re-establishing the connection between creators and the digital generation required a new approach, “As creators, we need to present, to build the bridge to, and work towards a new paradigm of interacting with consumers,” he concluded.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 17:20 PM

Super Session: Creators’ voice - The future of visual arts Georgina Adam, Theodore Feder, Hervé Di Rosa

From left to right: Georgina Adam, Theodore Feder, Hervé Di Rosa

Keynote speakers: Hervé Di Rosa, visual artist and painter, Vice-President of CISAC (France) Frank Stella, US painter and sculptor / Chair of CIAGP (International Council of Creators of Graphic, Plastic and Photographic Arts) / Represented on stage by Theodore Feder, President of Artists Rights Society, ARS (USA) Interviewed by: Georgina Adam, Art Market Editor at Large, The Art Newspaper / Art Market correspondent, Financial Times (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

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Di Rosa: ‘Authors’ rights are also about respect’ In his World Copyright Summit keynote, French visual artist Hervé Di Rosa urged his fellow creators to become more involved in building their future, reports Rémi Bouton.

Creators should “get involved” and “take their future in their hands”. This was the powerful message delivered by French visual artist Hervé Di Rosa during his World Copyright Summit super-session, ‘Creators’ voices — the future of visual arts’.

Asked by interviewer Georgina Adam, Editor-at-Large of The Art Newspaper and Art Market correspondent for the Financial Times, why he agreed to become Vice-President of CISAC, Di Rosa quite candidly replied: “I have been Vice-President and Board Member of France’s rights society ADAGP for four years and I believe that there is something called duty and I want to lead by example.

In music and in cinema, there is an industry. For visual arts, there is no such thing, and artists are isolated and not used to working collectively. And I noticed that artists do not really pay attention to the work done on our behalf by authors’ societies like ADAGP. So I really believe that there is a duty to act, to invest time and be present.”

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For Di Rosa, being an active creator also brings a different perspective to the debate about the new digital environment. “I do believe that artists will have to take their own future in their hands and speak out, the way I do,” he added. “I would be very happy to see others join me and add their voices. We all have different views and sensitivity, and it would be very interesting to confront these views. Artists should get involved and not remain silent actors, simply waiting for rights from their societies.”

Win support for ARR One of Di Rosa’s key missions at ADAGP and CISAC is to ensure that the artist re-sale right (ARR), which gives creators a cut on the re-sale of their works through auctions, remains both enshrined in European law and is extended elsewhere in the world, especially in the US. On this topic, Di Rosa was due to be joined on stage by US painter and sculptor Frank Stella. In his capacity as Chair of CISAC’s International Council of Creators of Graphic, Plastic and Photographic Arts (CIAGP), the US painter and sculptor was in Brussels to present a report before the CISAC board, and to appear at the Summit. However, Stella had to leave Brussels unexpectedly on account of an exhibition of his work that was due to open in Washington, DC two days later and, Theodore Feder, President of America’s Artists Rights Society (ARS), agreed to speak on his behalf.

At the moment, the ARR only exists in the US in California, but on a limited basis and is “easy to circumvent”, according to Feder. He explained that the visual artists’ community faced a two- to threeyear battle to achieve nation-wide ARR legislation through a Bill supported by Congress. “The re-sale right is something that we are lobbying and agitating for [in the US],” Feder added. “There is a legislative text that is making its rounds through the US Congress and, with Frank, we are due to appear before congressmen and senators to discuss the issue.”

Feder said he is hoping to “galvanize” artists and win support from Congress on the issue, but he admitted that “it is not going to be an easy battle”. He reported that there is strong resistance to the ARR from auction houses, especially Sotheby’s and Christie’s, both of which operate in the US and the UK. “In the US, they used to have the argument that, if the ARR is implemented in the United States, all the art-auction market would flee to the UK and, in the UK, they used to say the same thing. But the UK has adopted the ARR and, instead of the market fleeing away, it has in fact increased and grown. What it shows is that the introduction of the ARR did not diminish sales.”

Critical role of societies Di Rosa voiced his support for the work done by Stella and Feder in the US and claimed that, if the ARR was to be implemented in the US, it would definitely seal it for good in Europe. “We are constantly reminded of the US as the place where the arts market is so successful and that we are, in Europe and especially in France, so much behind when it comes to prices, that it would be wonderful not only for Europe but also for the rest of the world — China is becoming a huge market — if Ted and Frank succeeded,” Di Rosa said.

Like many established artists, Di Rosa makes most of his earnings through sales and ARR royalties, with reproduction rights only accounting for a small percentage — less than 3% — of his revenues.

“But it does not mean it is not important and it does not mean that the role of authors’ societies is not critical,” he stated. “Authors’ rights are not only about that. They are also about respect. The ability for an artist to control the flow of images of his works on the networks is fundamental, and this is the role of collective management societies too.”

Di Rosa explained that, for him, there are two ways to use the internet: one is as a creative tool; the other as a means of distribution and circulation of works. However, he cautioned that the internet has become “one big vegetable soup in which you can’t distinguish which vegetable you are eating”. The culinary metaphor nicely illustrated the difficulty of navigating the web and finding relevant content.

“My experience is that it [the internet] did not really help me to get much more exposure on a global basis,” Di Rosa added. Similarly, he has given up on trying to sell his art directly to consumers via his website. “I don’t think this is the role of artists to sell art — there’s galleries for that,” he quipped.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 17:40 PM

Keynote Speech: Creators – The agents of cultural diversity Ivo Josipović, Paul Williams

Keynote speaker: Ivo Josipović, composer / President of Croatia Interview by: Paul Williams, composer, songwriter and actor / President and Chairman of the Board, ASCAP (USA)

Link to: [Video and article]

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Josipović: ‘Collective management societies should be protected’ Croatian President Ivo Josipović closed the first day of the World Copyright Summit with a keynote speech praising the cultural and economic role of rights societies, reports Nicola Slade.

Croatian President Ivo Josipović used the platform provided by the World Copyright Summit to express his belief that respect for IP and cultural diversity are central to his mandate in a country that is undergoing yet another transition — this time to becoming part of the European Union.

In his keynote speech at the end of day one, entitled ‘Creators — the agents of cultural diversity’, the Croatian President explained that he wanted his country to be fully part of both the digital revolution and the European Union, for which Croatia is currently going through the final stages of the membership process.

As such, President Josipović said he welcomed the European Commission’s strategy to develop a single digital market. But he stressed that it is imperative to retain cultural diversity in the smaller European countries, especially in terms of their authors’ societies. “Coming from a country in transition trying to join the European Union with big societies and states, I really consider that collective management societies should be protected somehow, and those types of societies should be available for development of cultural activities,” he said.

He added: “For small countries, it’s very important to have international contacts and arrangements for all societies and individuals, and to engage our societies to help cultural activities. I compare cultural activities with blood. If there is no blood, there is no life.”

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Building a new society President Josipović shed light on his country’s recent history and how the break-up of the former Yugoslavia has presented a series of challenges for the recently independent Croatia, with its population of 4.5 million. And now that it is embarking on a programme to enter the EU, the country is confronting a new set of obstacles.

Post-war, Croatia set up its own collection society for the first time. “It was not always easy, because we had resistance from people who [had to] pay something —especially industry, tourism, the others using music in their business [such as] radio, TV stations and so on. But little by little, this idea that art, that creativity, must be paid for real improved in our country and, today, as I’m informed by my colleagues, we have a very efficient, very professional, very modern society.”

President Josipović displayed an implicit understanding of the issues affecting creators, due in large part to his own career as a successful composer and his former role as Secretary General of the Croatian Composers’ Society (HDS). President Josipović is also a keen supporter of CISAC, having attended the organisation’s congresses in the past.

Encouraging creativity In the subsequent Q&A session, interviewer Paul Williams — himself a composer and performer, as well as President and Chairman of the Board of the US society ASCAP — noted that Josipović used the slogan ‘New Justice’ is his election campaign. He asked the President whether the same term could be applied to copyright and artistic works. President Josipović replied: “‘New Justice’ was meant for our new society, in the face of old corruption, for those war veterans, but it also includes intellectual property. It’s just to pay artists; it’s just to support cultural activities.”

When asked by Williams whether Croatia’s entry into the EU would impact upon creators, Josipović said: “It allows us to move from one place to another. This is very important — that we can spread our creativity and our heritage. We are an open country.”

Finally, Williams questioned whether President Josipović’s rise to power has had any effect on his catalogue of musical works. Josipović explained that his work as a composer is currently “frozen” and that being President leaves him with little time to pursue his artistic career. However, he admitted — with a smile — that there has been “more interest in my compositions, particularly from abroad”.

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DAY 1 – June 7, 2011 – 17:40 PM

Wrap up of the first day of the Summit Paul Williams

Wrap up by: Paul Williams, composer, songwriter and actor / President and Chairman of the Board, ASCAP (USA)

Link to: [Video and article] [Photos]

Williams: “We have new justices on our side” ASCAP President and Chairman of the Board Paul Williams highlighted the role of authors’ societies in his closing remarks at the end of the first day of the World Copyright Summit, reports Juliana Koranteng.

American composer, songwriter and actor Paul Williams captured the mood of the World Copyright Summit in his speech at the close of day one, when he referred to the vital role that authors’ societies play in adding value to, and earning respect for, creativity.

“One thing we know is that creators’ rights are best served by the professionals in the world’s authors’ rights societies — more so than ever before in the current digital ecosystem we must all survive in,” said Williams, who is also President and Chairman of the Board of the US author’s society ASCAP. Williams’ comments came after he had interviewed keynote speaker Ivo Josipović, the President of the Republic of Croatia, a much respected composer in his own right and a staunch CISAC supporter.

In addition to thanking President Josipović for taking the time to address the Summit, Williams expressed admiration for the work of collecting societies in countries such as Croatia, where reverence for copyright remains, despite a recent history of war and deprivation.

“We must never forget to say thank-you to people who allow us to put shoes on our children’s feet and food on the table. So I want to say thank you, as a songwriter, for what you’ve given me,” Williams said.

Exchange ideas Williams then recapped the first day’s activities: “While the overarching theme is the author’s rights in the digital age, we have covered topics from a multiple of angles as summarised by the Summit’s three key words: create, connect and respect.”

He invited participants to continue to network at the end of the Summit’s first day, urging them to mull over their industries’ current status and the potential challenges of the future. “We have new justices on our side. We’re in an age when our life’s works can be delivered [to consumers] in nanoseconds. I hope we can go forward and express ourselves in our own way,” he said.

Referring to the Summit’s opening speech by CISAC president Robin Gibb, whom he saluted as “a great songwriter and performer”, Williams added: “This Summit may not resolve [all problems] in this fast-changing world we live in, but dialogue and the exchange of ideas and views are great beginnings.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 8:30 AM

Welcome Speech Stijn Coninx

Speaker: Stijn Coninx, film director / Chair of the Board of Directors, SABAM (Belgium)

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Coninx: ‘Respect all creators’ Creativity makes a positive difference to people’s lives. This was the key message from film director Stijn Coninx at the start of the World Copyright Summit’s second day, reports Juliana Koranteng.

Belgian film director Stijn Coninx made an impassionate plea in favour of creators as he opened the second day of the World Copyright Summit.

“As writers, authors, sculptors, musicians or composers, we contribute to the acceptance, understanding and enjoyment of life’s many aspects,” said Coninx, who is also Chair of the Board of Belgium’s author’s society SABAM. “Creators might sometimes be absent-minded or dreamers, but they are entitled to the right to be able to create, and the right to keep creating must be defended by all possible means.”

For Coninx, the role of creators in society is wider than is appreciated by policy-makers. “Politicians do not realise that the cost of social care can be reduced and people’s tolerance can be increased if the wealth of our creativity can be accessed by everyone,” he argued. “Policy-makers and regulators should not categorise the creative and cultural sectors as mere products that consumer pay for and that are abandoned when no longer useful. They are part of the fabric that makes any community or society unique.”

For Coninx, the Summit’s tag line, ‘Create, connect, respect’, is “what brings us together today. And, surely, that last element — respect — should be emphasised even more.”

Changing lives As a filmmaker, Coninx said he had observed the special connection fans felt with his works. In exchange for buying a cinema ticket, he had affected their lives for the better. And that is an experience that policy-makers and regulators should never dismiss, he insisted.

He added: “What sticks most in my memory is when people come up to me after watching one of my pictures and say, ‘Thank you for making that movie. It moved me’.”

None of the good things in life, however, comes free, Coninx pointed out. If society is to continue to benefit from the invaluable pleasure that creativity gives, then it must be prepared to pay for it via copyright. Referring to ‘Thank You For The Music’, the official last single by Swedish pop band ABBA, Coninx said: “We could answer, ‘You are welcome’. But if we want more of these beautifully created works, then there must be a fair trade [in] copyright.”

Unlike a fine bottle of wine, you cannot finish consuming the music, throw it away and then buy another one, Coninx noted. “The music and words remain in your memory. You cannot ban it from you mind, because you need music in your life.”

He then made a plea to the Summit’s delegates: “Respect all these creators who make our lives pleasant and all the more interesting and worthwhile.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 8:35 AM

Keynote Conversation: Global perspectives on IP and copyright – The role of international organisations Francis Gurry interviewed by Eric Baptiste

Francis Gurry (L) and Eric Baptiste (R)

Keynote speaker: Francis Gurry, Director General, WIPO (Worldwide Intellectual Property Organisation) (Switzerland) Interviewed by: Eric Baptiste, CEO, SOCAN (Canada) Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

WIPO’s Gurry sets the copyright agenda for the 21st century Francis Gurry’s World Copyright Summit keynote examined the challenges facing WIPO in its mission to develop a “balanced and accessible” international system of intellectual property, writes Adrian Crookes.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has been going through a major re-evaluation of its tasks and priorities under the leadership of Director General Francis Gurry, who took the helm of the Geneva-based United Nations agency in 2008.

Challenge number one appears to be the pace of change taking place in the new digital ecosystem.

“We need to move at a quicker pace to handle the requirements of new business models,” admitted Gurry in his keynote conversation with Eric Baptiste, current CEO of Canada’s authors’ society SOCAN and former Director General of CISAC. The session was entitled ‘Global perspectives on IP and copyright — the role of international organisations’, and Gurry did not shy away from the central topic. He admitted that his change agenda may not be helped by the fact that his organisation — created in 1967 — is still dealing with legacy issues from the last century, notably those relating to broadcasters and audiovisual usage.

But Gurry was cautiously optimistic about the future. He said that technology poses both a danger and an opportunity for creators; the latter is predicated on “getting the systems right”.

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Those systems, at least from a WIPO perspective, were last re-visited in 1996 in the form of an international treaty on copyright. Gurry acknowledged that the process of fashioning international treaties is becoming increasingly difficult. For him, this situation is, first and foremost, the result of a geo-political change that has left the international community finding it difficult to agree on anything.

And second, with technologies changing so rapidly, designing new legislation to accommodate them has become “like hitting a moving target and no-one wants to take the first steps that might prove to be non-neutral. Neutrality is very important.”

Fostering dialogue Gurry was quizzed on how WIPO intended to bring technology companies into the system, given that they were largely absent from the discussions 15 years ago. He was keen to explain that WIPO would not impose a solution. “This will come by dialogue,” he said. But he stressed that a WIPO role could be to bring parties together to “stimulate a discussion about financing culture in the 21st century” and that intermediaries were the key to future solutions.

Gurry added that consumers must become part of the solution too. Asked whether he felt the argument for copyright had been lost in some territories or on a new generation, he was forthright.

“It’s not a generation lost,” he said, adding that baby boomers were just as likely to pirate copyright material as younger generations.

Indeed, Gurry felt that a change of culture was required among all generations that had familiarity with new technology. “Instead of always emphasising piracy, we need to engage their responsibility as part of society for creative culture,” he suggested. “We should encourage consumers to think how we are going to continue to finance the music and films they all enjoy.”

In this process, Gurry said the rights-holder community had a full role to play and called on it to make sure that its voice is heard. Otherwise, he feared that technology or the market would “impose solutions that may or may not be suitable”.

Gurry argued for a balanced approach, requiring the co-ordination of the legal environment, infrastructure, culture change and new business models. And he believes that WIPO is the key to “pulling it together more coherently”.

Providing expertise Another WIPO strength is its experience and knowledge of running successful registries — and Gurry saw this as an area for future development. While it may require a change of governance, he was keen to offer his expertise in the development of the much-discussed global database of rights information. In his keynote, he referred to the two ideas currently on the table: the International Music Registry (IMR) and the Global Repertoire Database (GRD).

Rejecting criticism that WIPO may not have the required commercial expertise for such a project, Gurry assured his audience that it could certainly become part of the solution. Had WIPO already engaged Google to help, he was asked? “We have discussed the future of copyright with them,” he replied. “We share a vision but we haven’t gone there as far as the IMR [is concerned]. If Google agreed to be part of the project, it would have to be on our terms: a global public asset, free for all, owned by no-one, available to everyone and for use with whatever business model.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 8:35 AM

Panel Discussion: European perspectives on IP and copyright – Creators meet policy-makers Frank Dostal, Marisa Fernandez Esteban, Marielle Gallo, Alfons Karabuda, Lisbeth Kirk, Maria Martin-Prat, Johannes Studinger, Dariusz Urbanski

From left to right : Frank Dostal, Marisa Fernandez Esteban, Lisbeth Kirk, Marielle Gallo, Alfons Karabuda, Maria Martin‐Prat, Johannes Studinger, Dariusz Urbanski

Speakers: Frank Dostal, songwriter and producer / President of German Lyricists Coalition / Vice Chairman of Supervisory Board, GEMA (Germany) Marisa Fernandez Esteban, Policy Officer “Globalisation, copyright, competition”, Unit Culture Policy, Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue, DG Education and Culture, European Commission (Belgium) Marielle Gallo, Member of the Committee on Legal Affairs, European Parliament (France) Alfons Karabuda. Composer / Executive chairman, SKAP (Swedish Society of Popular Music Composers) / Chairman, ECSA (European Composer & Songwriter Alliance) (Sweden) Maria Martin-Prat, Head of Unit “Copyright”, Intellectual Property Directorate, DG Internal Market and Services, European Commission (Belgium) Johannes Studinger, Head of UNI-MEI, UNI Europa (Germany) Dariusz Urbanski, Attaché for the Polish Presidency of the EU Council - Copyright law and enforcement of intellectual property rights, Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to the EU (Poland) Moderator: Lisbeth Kirk, Editor in Chief, EUobserver.com (Belgium) Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Understand before you legislate, creators urge policy-makers Policy-makers need a better understanding of how the creative and cultural sectors function before proposing new copyright legislation. This was the charge laid before policy-makers by a group of European creators at the World Copyright Summit. Juliana Koranteng and Nicola Slade report.

The World Copyright Summit panel discussion ‘European perspectives on IP and copyright – creators meet policy-makers’ offered creators the opportunity to listen to and interrogate European policymakers about their agenda for the creative industries.

At the heart of the discussion was the creators’ contention that policy-makers do not fully appreciate their needs and expectations, or their contribution to Europe’s economy.

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The debate — moderated by Lisbeth Kirk, Editor-in-Chief of Brussels-based online news service EUobserver.com — came a few weeks after the European Commission unveiled plans to set up a legal framework to bring intellectual property into the digital age. The EC’s proposal is expected to be ready towards the end of this year or early next year, said Maria Martin-Prat, Head of Unit ‘Copyright’ at the European Commission’s Intellectual Property Directorate, part of DG Internal Market and Services, which is the department in charge of IP and copyright issues in Brussels.

Martin-Prat took the opportunity to reassure the audience about orphan works. “We are encouraging a dialogue among stakeholders about orphan and out-of-print works and we aim to have a Green Paper on that very issue available by the autumn,” she said.

This news particularly pleased Dariusz Urbanski, who noted that orphan works are “the top priority for our [the Polish] Presidency [of the European Union].” Urbanski is the Attaché for the Polish Presidency of the EU Council in charge of copyright law and the enforcement of intellectual property rights and works at the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to the EU. Bolster financing Urbanski also highlighted the problem of piracy and called on the EU member states to exchange solid data on the traffic of IPR piracy on the web. “Despite having useful stats, we still lack common methodology on the collection of data for IPR piracy. We need to exchange such data and best practice between each of the EU countries,” he stated.

Marisa Fernandez Esteban, who is the Policy Officer dealing with globalisation, copyright and competition at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture, delivered a short, but particularly interesting speech, in which she confirmed that the EC is devising ways to bolster the financing of creative and cultural SMEs — a problem that has been further exacerbated by the financial crisis.

She said: “Copyright is one angle. This IP strategy refers to the valuing of all IP assets relating to SMEs — that is, copyright, licensing and royalties — and how some issues relating to those can hinder the progress of SMEs.” Fernandez Esteban added: “The key issue is how to facilitate access to finance and we are looking at ways government can fund SMEs in the creative and cultural sectors — guaranteeing their loans on IP assets, for example.”

Marielle Gallo, Member of the Committee on Legal Affairs at the European Parliament, stressed the need for urgency when it comes to developing the European digital market. “Europe was not prepared for the digital age and, as a result, it has been taken over by Google,” said the French MEP. “But we should be the players in the European digital market.”

Winning the race Gallo also outlined what the creative sectors, particularly the music industry, can expect from the Commission in coming months: “The huge amount of work has started and there are two essential points. Firstly, a draft directive on the ‘collective management’ of collection societies [which was due for September 2011 but has been delayed]. Secondly, a directive on the respect for IP, which is due at the start of 2012. This will set out how we protect the distribution of content, particularly music.”

Naturally, talk of piracy was not far from Gallo’s lips and she confidently stated that the EC will “help companies struggling against piracy”. However, she also recognised that cultural diversity, multilanguage territories and the lack of harmonisation in VAT rates are issues that need to be overcome.

“We have to provide Europe with the legal means to win the race,” she concluded.

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The creators’ reaction to these perspectives was something of a reality check for policy-makers.

Frank Dostal, President of Germany’s Lyricists Coalition and Vice Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the German authors’ society GEMA, insisted that creators needed practical solutions, not theoretical wish lists. “I would rather work and make a living protected by intelligent and just IP and authors’ rights,” he declared.

Dostal was also concerned about global conglomerates such as Google, the search-engine giant, offering to use their billions in revenues to safeguard creators’ works. For Dostal, such an offer is highly sensitive, because creators are constantly negotiating with corporations like Google that want to use their works. “A company worth $80 billion can’t be a private UNESCO or a secret Red Cross,” Dostal said about Google. Instead, he would prefer “Google and YouTube to pay us adequate remuneration”.

Gain respect Johannes Studinger, head of Europe’s creators union and guild UNI-MEI/UNI Europa, expressed concern that policy-makers fail to grasp the hard work and sacrifices that creators make to sustain their vocation. “Our works are not for free,” he stated. “What the EC can be doing is help us gain respect.”

Studinger said the Gallo Report, drafted in 2010 by the MEP and panellist Marielle Gallo, was a step in the right direction. “It called for a just and balanced enforcement of IP rights,” Studinger continued.

“But even though we love what we do, [regulators need to understand that] what we do is precarious work in an unsustainable ecosystem. Yet, we keep getting the impression that this is not fully understood by policy-makers.”

The vast majority of creators are not big-league income earners, explained composer Alfons Karabuda, when the EC’s Marisa Fernandez Esteban suggested setting up a fund to support small-tomedium creative enterprises. Karabuda is a composer and Executive Chairman of the Swedish Society of Popular Music Composers (SKAP) and Chairman of the European Composer & Songwriter Alliance (ECSA).

“If we don’t know whose money it is, you end up with a problem,” Karabuda said. He would prefer creators to earn their income in a transparent way. “We want secure rights for what we’ve created.

Not only do I want to share and distribute my work with others via the internet, [but] the sharing has to be two ways, including the sharing of the money.”

Studinger agreed that the EC’s plans for the new IP directive were “ambitious”, observing that this was all the more reason why policy-makers and creators should “engage in a much stronger dialogue to make sure it moves in the right direction”.

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 9:55 AM

Keynote Speech: US perspectives on IP and copyright Victoria Espinel

Keynote speaker: Victoria Espinel, US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, Executive Office of the President (USA)

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Espinel: ‘Intellectual property is critical to the internet’ US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel outlined for the World Copyright Summit’s participants her country’s policies in the field of copyright, writes Anthea Sarris.

The first incumbent of the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator office, Victoria Espinel, has made a significant impact on both the local and international IP landscape in less than two years.

In one of her first major appearances outside of the US, Espinel delivered a keynote address at the 2011 World Copyright Summit in which she shared with delegates her insights into the development and execution of the White House’s strategies on IP and copyright, as well as her perspectives on the key issues impacting on the IP landscape.

Working directly under the authority of President Barak Obama, Espinel has the task of co-ordinating the action of the US government’s various agencies and departments dealing with IP issues — 17,000 people within the US government work in this field.

“My job is to make sure intellectual property laws are working properly and that they are enforced,” she explained. “As America continues to invest in the knowledge-based economy, more growth in our economy, more jobs in our communities and more solutions to our common challenges depend on functioning and enforced intellectual property laws.”

Engaging with communities Her office has delivered the US Administration’s Strategy for Intellectual Property Enforcement and the International Strategy for Cyberspace — initiatives that are already delivering positive outcomes for rights holders in the US. Espinel said she undertook a collaborative approach to developing the Obama Administration’s Strategy for IP Enforcement, gathering feedback from the public, business, academics and consumer groups. It was released in June 2010 to strong bi-partisan support, as well as to support from the business and labour communities.

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In Espinel’s view, the Strategy for IP Enforcement is a move away from the top-down, command-andcontrol model of authority. Under Espinel’s leadership, the Office for Intellectual Property Enforcement has embarked on a detailed plan of execution, founded on three key principles: • Make good laws – and then enforce them. Espinel gave the example of the Operation In Our Sites initiative, which, in 2010, conducted five operations seizing 120 domain names of websites engaged in distributing pirate or counterfeit goods. The Coordinator also referenced the 20 recommendations for legislative changes made to Congress. US Congress has shown a great deal of interest in developing tools — “rogue website legislation” — to stop websites engaged in substantial criminal infringing activity.

• Engage the private sector to create voluntary solutions through productive conversations, with the aim of dramatically reducing online infringement and changing the enforcement paradigm. “In order for the internet to be as productive and compelling as possible, we need to have active engagement from companies that interact with and benefit from internet commerce,” Espinel explained. “They have a role in making the internet function in a responsible way. I do not believe that we need to add additional regulation on how they conduct their businesses or mandate new obligations for how they run their systems.”

• Educate consumers to ensure they are aware of the laws, and risks, associated with the online infringement of goods.

And finally, through these efforts, set a positive example not just to US citizens, but to governments and citizens around the world.

Leading by example To this end, the Office for IP Enforcement recently released its International Strategy for Cyberspace, calling for domestic laws to respect intellectual-property rights and actions to protect intellectualproperty theft.

“The United States must lead by example,” Espinel said. “And we are at our best when we work together to develop creative, practical and efficient solutions that promote innovation and protect the foundation that enables the internet to fulfil its promise.”

Espinel confirmed that the US government has a two-pronged approach to the development of the knowledge-based economy. One is to provide the right environment for business to develop; the other is to ensure that rights holders are protected.

“Intellectual property is critical to the internet,” she said. “And not just for the creators and innovators — it is also of critical importance for consumers. The promise of the internet is, after all, about improving quality of life for individuals, families and communities.”

Commenting on the cloud, the digital storage model where personal data is stored online as opposed to on a local hard drive, Espinel noted: “It is my view that the cloud may intensify what are essentially variations of issues that arose years ago with the advent of the internet. So the cloud may accelerate the pace at which we need to address these issues.”

Combat illegal offers But Espinel also believes that the cloud has the potential to increase access to legitimate content.

“Amazon and Google — and most recently Apple — have announced cloud music services,” she said. “These are also attempts to give consumers a more flexible service. Questions have been raised about the legality of some of these services. We hope these questions are sorted out. As a government, we want to, and are looking for ways to, encourage new legal alternatives. So the flexibility of the cloud may help spur the development of compelling legal alternatives. And we will continue to combat the illegal alternatives.”

Espinel closed her keynote by affirming the US’ commitment to enforcing intellectual property and working closely with Europe. “We know we will be much more effective if we are working together, as closely and co-operatively as possible, with Europe,” she concluded.

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 10:10 AM

Super Session: Creators’ voice - The future of copyright in India Javed Akhtar interviewed by Simon Darlow

Keynote speaker: Javed Akhtar, scriptwriter, poet and lyricist (India) Interviewed by: Simon Darlow, songwriter and producer / Board of Directors, PRS for Music (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

India’s Akhtar sheds ‘ray of light’ on authors Bollywood legend Javed Akhtar told the World Copyright Summit how he took on the Indian establishment and successfully fought for the recognition of authors’ rights in his native country, reports Rémi Bouton.

When Javed Akhtar started a few years ago to lobby the Indian government for the recognition of authors’ rights, he knew very little about copyright law.

The celebrated Indian poet, lyricist and scriptwriter made this candid admission during this keynote conversation at the World Copyright Summit. “After being a writer for over 30 years, I did not have a faintest idea of what were performing rights, what were publishing rights,” he told British composer and PRS for Music board member Simon Darlow.

He continued, “One day a group of writers and musicians came to me and said that I should contest the election at IPRS. I told them I was totally ignorant of everything. [But] I did contest the election and I won the election. And when I went for the first meeting of the governing board, lo and behold, there was an injunction [against Akhtar] by a music company and we could not hold that meeting.

That happened in 2004. That was the last time I saw the offices of IPRS.”

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Unfair treatment Akhtar discovered that IPRS’s board was dominated by music companies and authors had a limited voice. “A question that disturbed me was ‘why are they so shy of me’? And what will happen if I come to the governing body? When I tried to find the answer to these two questions I realised that IPRS is one performing society in the world that is unique: it is totally owned by music companies. There are two categories of members today, owner members and ordinary members. All the music that has been recorded from 1933 ‘til today is owned by 23 music companies. And all the composers and writers of India, including somebody like A.R. Rahman, a twice Oscar winner, even someone like Ravi Shankar whom the Beatles treated like a guru, have no copyright.”

From this moment, Bollywood legend embarked on a journey that would eventually see the Indian copyright legislation changed to incorporate authors’ rights. What started it all was the sense that the system was unfairly balanced towards music companies and film studios. “In last 10 years with advent of new technologies such as ringtones and ringback tones, rights holders realised that there was a lot of money in the royalties which are paid through [Indian performing rights society] IPRS but perhaps not getting their share’” said Akhtar.

Intense lobbying In the Bollywood system, he explained, authors and composers were paid a flat fee for their work and contractually relinquished all their rights to music companies, which in turn, make deals with film studios. “In our country,” said Akhtar, “almost 85% of music comes from films. And the big film producers get upfront money from music companies, who make us signs contracts and then the rights are shared between them. And the musicians, the composers and the authors, they are just witnesses. They get whatever amount they get and that is the end of the story. So we took this to the government.”

Although his actions led him to be boycotted by the film studios, Akhtar went on and regrouped the creative community and started lobbying the government and the Parliament. With the support of his peers, he sent letters to the Prime Minister, to the Council Minister, to the leader of the Opposition, and the Upper House and the Lower House, asking for the system to be changed and for their rights to be non-transferable.

Political support As a result, the government proposed a new intellectual property law in India, which would make authors’ rights non transferable, and therefore allow authors to earn royalties for the public performances of their works. At the time of the Summit, the Copyright Bill still needed to be adopted by the Parliament but Akhtar was confident it would be passed, considering the high level of support it received from policy-makers.

“All political parties – who are normally at loggerheads on all issues – from extreme right to extreme left, have supported us in this issue without any reservation and I am very thankful for that,” enthused Akhtar, who also welcomed support he received from the international music community, including CISAC through its President Robin Gibb.

The next step, according to Akhtar, will be to foster changes within IPRS to make room for authors and to introduce more transparency. “Authors should not be afraid to defend their rights” concluded Akhtar. “And by supporting me you are supporting all Indian authors.”

Catching the mood of the audience and speaking from the floor, PRS for Music chairman Guy Fletcher reacted to Akhtar’s keynote with the following words: “You’ve shed a ray of light in what is a very gloomy world, and I wanted to thank you and pledge support from us."

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 11:00 AM

Focus Session: New solutions - An update on European online licensing Nicolas Galibert, Harald Heker, Andrew Jenkins, Nicholas Motsatse, Albert Pastore, András Szinger

From left to right : Nicholas Motsatse, Nicolas Galibert, Harald Heker, Andrew Jenkins, Albert Pastore, András Szinger

Speakers: Nicolas Galibert, Chair of ICMP (International Confederation of Music Publishers) / President, Sony / ATV Music Publishing (France) Harald Heker, CEO, GEMA (Germany) Andrew Jenkins, Executive Vice President International, Universal Music Publishing Group (UK) Albert Pastore, Senior Legal Counsel – Music, Nokia (UK) András Szinger, CEO, Artisjus (Hungary) Moderator: Nicholas Motsatse, Vice-Chair of CISAC Board of Directors / CEO, SAMRO (South Africa) Link to: [Video and article]

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Hubs, GRD and Goulash to help pan-European digital licensing A panel at the World Copyright Summit agreed there have been positive developments with regards to pan-European online licensing, even if the situation remains complex, writes Nicola Slade.

Tasked with the challenge of discussing how online licensing has changed in the two years since the last World Copyright Summit, a group of representatives from rights holders and digital services concluded that the overall picture has improved since 2009, but is still far from the smooth process envisaged by rights holders, the European Commission, and online and mobile services.

Playing the candid moderator, Nicholas Motsatse, Vice-Chair of CISAC Board and CEO of South Africa’s society SAMRO, asked the panel if “we are close to finding a solution to pan-European licensing or are we still far away from it”?

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It was pointed out that a ‘rights user’, such as a digital music company, still had to negotiate upwards of 30 licenses should it wish to launch a pan-European service. “Have there been improvements in the past years? Yes, I would say there have been various initiatives that have begun to aggregate repertoire to a certain extent and to create what we hope [will] be a commercially functioning digital single market in Europe,” said Nokia’s Senior Legal Counsel for Music Albert Pastore, who alluded to the creation of repertoire “hubs” such as Armonia, which regroups repertoire from France’s Sacem, Italy’s SIAE, Spain’s SGAE and Portugal’s SPA. “We would invite other rights holders and societies to consider other similar initiatives,” Pastore added.

But even if there have been improvements in the way repertoire is licensed, Pastore remarked that the problems of pan-European licensing are creating what he sees as “missed opportunities” compared to more “digitally advanced markets” such as Japan and the US. He elaborated: “The average consumption of music is still €2 per user for digital music in Europe. In some cases, such as Italy, it is as low as €0.60 per user. Yet in the US and Japan it can be as high as €9 per person.”

Find solutions Universal Music Publishing Group’s Executive Vice President of International, Andrew Jenkins, was simultaneously optimistic and cautious. “We are definitely closer to a solution — the problem is that only some of us found the solution,” he said, noting “the admirable work” conducted by Sacem, GEMA and CELAS to license anybody who approaches them for pan-European licenses.

“The way that digital retailers like Nokia and, in particular, Apple have taken a big step forward in embracing the market and working with us to develop this pan-European business has been fantastic,” Jenkins enthused.

But he added that it was short sighted to look simply at the problems in Europe and called on rights owners to start devising global, multi-territory licenses in order to “give digital retailers what they want”. He added: “There’s no point talking about the Barcelona [and] Santiago agreements — that’s the past. We need to talk about the future.”

However, instead of focusing on the problems of online licensing, Jenkins turned the argument around to piracy. “It’s not the people who come to us for a license who are the problem,” he said. “It’s the people who don’t come to us who are the problem.”

Harald Heker, CEO of German society GEMA, also drew the argument back to piracy. “I totally agree with that,” he concurred, “because piracy is still our major problem and is growing. Our problem is that 90% of the market is illegal. We can’t establish a functioning legal market without solving that problem.”

Legal framework The other issue that Heker would like to see resolved is what he called “legal uncertainties”. “It is not yet sure whether and under which conditions collecting societies can operate and act cross-borders,” he pointed out. “We improved licensing a little bit, but I look forward to the EC’s Directive to see where and how we can improve [still further]. This could be a great chance for authors and collecting societies to clear this legal uncertainty, which we need to operate in this market.”

Paris-based Nicolas Galibert, Chair of music publishers’ global body ICMP and CEO of Sony/ATV Music Publishing France, agreed with Jenkins that it is “useless” to rehash the past, and pleaded for more energy to be put into solving today’s problems. He noted that some progress had been made since the last Summit in Washington, DC in 2009 in the area of copyright awareness.

“Awareness has improved in the users’ minds, in the consumers’ minds and in the media,” Galibert said. “It was difficult to express what our business was about and what was our philosophy — copyright protection is about philosophy, not just business — and I now think it is happening.”

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Galibert explained how France’s graduated-response Hadopi law has had a dual effect: “We have seen, via the Hadopi legislation, that copyright awareness has improved in the user’s mind. Two years ago, we were discussing legal frameworks and now I am proud to say that in France we are changing attitudes.”

Alluding to the Summit’s tag line — ‘Create, Connect, Respect’ — Galibert emphasised that that the “connect” and “respect” (which he also tied to “protect”) aspects should be global, while “create” should remain local.

András Szinger, CEO of Hungarian society Artisjus, on the other hand, was more concerned with the developments surrounding localised content. “For us, local licensing remains the main aspect of the business,” he said. “There are many local services tailored to local needs. It is also essential to talk about national licensing.”

Re-aggregate repertoire Szinger pointed out that the current system favours the licensing of Anglo-American repertoire and leaves local repertoire on the side of the road. “What we would like to achieve,” he said, “is the reaggregation of local repertoire into the wider pan-European services, and that requires a specific type of agreement or negotiation.”

Two relatively recent developments were touched upon by the panel: the creation of the Global Repertoire Database (GRD), which Universal’s Jenkins said “would facilitate licensing”; and regional ‘hubs’ that can license content on a localised basis. However, both initiatives are still in development and will take some time to become operational. Galibert observed that, on many issues, it is the collaborative effort of all the players rather than legislation that helps to move a situation forward. “We need to work together on the GRD and we need to simplify the users’ access to repertoire,” he said.

According to GEMA’s Heker, this also includes efforts to “re-aggregate repertoire” and create hubs through which rights holders can bring in repertoire. “There will be possibilities to hopefully, again, be able to offer the whole world repertoire to the users who need it,” Heker added.

Artisjus’ Szinger said he welcomed the idea of regional hubs for licensing, but believed that the benefits would be limited. “It is all well and good to look at the situation from London, but we have to make sure that they understand our local situation,” he pointed out. He jokingly concluded that his society might set up its own hub under the acronym GOULASH. A stronger Europe Pastore pointed out that Europe has had countless innovators in the digital field but that the ecosystem has not always allowed them to blossom. He noted that the first legal digital download service operated in Europe, that the first legal streaming subscription service was launched in Europe — and ditto for the first a-la-carte streaming service.

Said Pastore: “We need to find solutions that would work for all players. What we would like to see is a digital single market where the European space creates access for European innovators to 500 million consumers and where rights holders would have access for all their various repertoires to 500 million consumers, and where consumers would have access to legal services. This means that, if a service is launched in the UK and Finland, it goes without saying that people in Hungary, Romania, Spain or Italy should also be able to access that same service. We think that Europe would be a lot stronger for service providers, rights holders and consumers if we had a single digital market for all of our creative content.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 11:45 AM

Focus Session: New solutions – Global copyright management databases Robert Ashcroft, Eric Baptiste, Susan Butler, Neil Gaffney, Bendik Hofseth, Sylvain Piat

From left to right : Susan Butler, Robert Ashcroft, Eric Baptiste, Neil Gaffney, Bendik Hofseth, Sylvain Piat

Speakers: Robert Ashcroft, Chief Executive, PRS for Music (UK) Eric Baptiste, CEO, SOCAN (Canada) Neil Gaffney, Executive Vice President & Head of European Society Relations, EMI Music Publishing (UK) Bendik Hofseth, composer and Saxophonist (Norway) Sylvain Piat, Former Director of International Information Network, CISAC / Head of International Partnerships, SACEM (France) Moderator: Susan Butler, Executive Editor and Publisher, Music Confidential (USA) Link to: [Video and article]

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Two steps closer to a global copyright database The concept of a global copyright database — a topic of heated debate among stakeholders for many years — seems to be moving closer to reality. And it is now all the more likely, given that two different proposals have been set out for discussion, Adrian Crookes reports.

You wait years for a global copyright database and then two come along at once. With CISAC’s announced involvement in the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) project and WIPO’s declared intention to assist in the delivery of the similar International Music Registry initiative (IMR), which one should you back? And what is the current state of play with each?

These were questions moderator Susan Butler, Founder, Executive Editor and Publisher of newsletter Music Confidential, wanted answered by key players during the World Copyright Summit session ‘New solutions — global copyright management databases’.

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The two concepts are both at early-development stage and both have similar aims: to create one repository of ownership information for the world’s music copyrights. The GRD is being driven by a consortium of eight companies and rights societies (Amazon, EMI Music Publishing, iTunes, Nokia, PRS for Music, SACEM, STIM and Universal Music Publishing) and the IMR by WIPO, which boasts a steering group drawn from a large cross-section of organisations operating within the international music industry.

Accurate copyright-ownership information is the Holy Grail for rights holders and licensees alike.

Within CISAC, the CIS-Net project has been developed since 1998 and has been a leading driver of improved accuracy and increased efficiency in this regard. Over the last 13 years, it has connected databases at 74 contributing societies and over 100 user societies, and gives access to 50 million works.

“This is a powerful tool used by CISAC members to share documentation about their musical works,” explained Sylvain Piat, the former Director of International Information Network at CISAC and current Head of International Partnerships at France’s SACEM, who led the CIS-Net project during his time working for CISAC. A new environment In his presentation at the beginning of the session, Piat suggested that “this is the time for CISAC and CIS-Net to re-think the CIS-Net concept” in view of the changing environment. “We have to remember that CIS-Net was developed to meet very specific requirements defined in 1998, and to allow sharing information between societies,” he said. “It is a global documentation network but, now that we have new emerging needs, we have new requirements as we have to face the new environment of online licensing.”

For Piat, pulling all copyright-ownership information into one global database makes sense, but he warned that the complexities involved in doing so should not be underestimated, with national constraints and regional needs to be taken into account. And he pointed out that the sheer task of reloading the 50 million works currently estimated to be connected via CIS-net would be no mean feat.

In the ensuing discussion about the global database concept, GRD and IMR representatives were asked by Butler to define the state of development of both their projects and their financing. “[It] is a data utility,” said Neil Gaffney, Executive Vice-President and Head of European Society Relations at EMI Music Publishing, about the GRD. For Gaffney, the project “provides an opportunity for the first time ever to create a central repository of authoritative data around musical works, ownership and representation. That data can be accessed by all collecting societies.”

He added: “It is a once and for all chance to deliver a fully reconciled listing of everything musical in existence that can be used on a national or multi-territory basis.” As such, he explained, it would deliver “significant benefits”: reduce costs and make more worldwide repertoire available to more collecting societies to license and distribute, based on accurate information.

According to Gaffney, all the major publishers have committed to GRD and he hoped all the major collecting societies would be doing so during the next phase of wider stakeholder consultation, which will be conducted by the Deloitte consultancy. “We have come a very long way in this project,” he said.

Consolidating databases GRD’s infrastructure will be based on the ICE system, a joint venture developed recently by British authors’ society PRS for Music and Sweden’s STIM. The project grew from a need by both societies to update and consolidate their own databases with the intention to sell on back-office processing to others.

PRS for Music chief executive Robert Ashcroft said the data-matching operation of the two society databases indicated that there are around 13 million unique works in the world. This is significantly lower than the 50 million suggested by CIS-Net, he observed, which shows the size of the data cleanup operation required in terms of duplicate removal. “There is a huge need for reconciliation of the data,” Ashcroft added.

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Ashcroft recognised that governance, ownership, financing and business models would be key to the success of GRD. “We [PRS for Music and STIM] have been entrepreneurs to date and borne the cost of the investment, but it’s not tenable for two societies to be gatekeepers for the world’s data going forward,” he said.

Norwegian composer and Saxophonist Bendik Hofseth, who has been involved in the IMR initiative, outlined funding details for the project. “WIPO are prepared to set it up,” he said, “and we have a set of proposals on the table for sponsor funding after the initial WIPO investment.” He suggested that IMR would extend to more than just musical works registration and that it would be wider in geographical scope, also embracing all the rights, including neighbouring rights.

“But GRD is global,” said Gaffney, attempting to lay to rest the notion that theirs is a European initiative. He added that GRD would also deal with all rights.

Avoid duplication Confirming that CISAC had made the decision during its June 6 board meeting to join the GRD working group, board member Eric Baptiste said CISAC’s involvement would help to evaluate requirements and share the knowledge learnt over the many years of CIS-Net implementation. “The view of the societies around the world is that we are very proud of what we have accomplished,” he said. “It’s not perfect and there is a need to move on to the new phase.”

Baptiste, the former Director General of CISAC and current CEO of Canada’s society SOCAN, said CISAC’s approach to these database projects was of “good faith” and was aimed at “contributing to the thinking”. He explained that CISAC had looked at some issues already, including the clean up of conflicting data. “It is not a simple task,” he stated, echoing Ashcroft’s views.

Baptiste confirmed that CISAC would also engage with IMR and would be in a better position to make recommendations to societies about a way forward by the end of the year. “What we do not want to do is [to] duplicate effort and waste our member’s money,” Baptiste said. “The key for us is making sure we don’t re-develop things that have already been developed.”

He added that governance was going to be “a big issue” for both projects, and that the financial models should be carefully thought through in order not to “add further burden” to the societies.

Baptiste also raised the issue of data ownership and privacy, citing the “complex tapestry of privacy laws around the world”.

Positive impact Butler pointed out that the term “public asset” has been used in connection with IMR and raised the question of its validity. Baptiste explained that CISAC members were concerned about this, as was he with the valedictory use of WIPO’s patent registration experience. “We are not sure it’s completely relevant,” he said. “Copyright doesn’t work the same way. We wouldn’t expect to charge creators to register a musical work as you would for a patent, for example.”

So what of those macro issues that have derailed so many major projects before? Wouldn’t a global database give more power to major rights holders who would later “repay” the societies by pulling out rights and licensing their content direct? And what if five or six major societies combined their back offices and licensed on a global basis, which would impact negatively on smaller societies?

“It’s the other way round,” Ashcroft suggested. “It would have a positive impact on those societies who currently find it difficult to get their repertoire represented in pan-European deals.”

“We already have a global database of EMI works,” Gaffney added, “and a centrally held database won’t mean that I can license on Universal’s behalf.”

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A representative from WIPO, speaking from the floor, was keen to point out that IMR has not been launched in competition with GRD and that collaboration between the two projects was welcome. The patent analogy has been used merely to demonstrate their data management experience and efficiency in a commercial environment and is not intended to reflect a copyright-registration template.

And “public good” does not mean everything is visible. Confidential work-ownership information would stay confidential, the WIPO executive stressed.

Whether it will be one of the current proposals or a combination of the two that wins through is yet to be determined. But, with the digital market as driver, it is likely that a global repertoire database will finally come to fruition.

“Here’s to finding out more about this soon,” wrapped up Butler. “And by that I mean I hope it doesn’t take 20 years.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 11:45 AM

Focus Session: Connecting creators and consumers Sandra Aistars, Fred Bolza, Niamh Byrne, Lucinda Fell, Helienne Lindvall, Marie-Françoise Marais, Martin Salamon

Clockwise: Helienne Lindvall, Fred Bolza, Sandra Aistars, Niamh Byrne, Marie‐ Françoise Marais, Martin Salamon, Lucinda Fell

Speakers: Sandra Aistars, Executive Director, Copyright Alliance (USA) Niamh Byrne, creator of the “Music matters” campaign / creative content strategy, Universal Music (UK) & Fred Bolza, Vice President, Marketing Services, Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Lucinda Fell, Director of Policy & Communications, Childnet International (UK) Marie-Françoise Marais, President, HADOPI (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur internet) (France) Martin Salamon, Chief Counsel, Danish Consumer Council (Denmark) Moderator: Helienne Lindvall, songwriter / columnist, The Guardian (Sweden) Link to: [Video and article]

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One message, many ways to connect creators and consumers At a dedicated session at the 2011 World Copyright Summit, delegates were given the opportunity to find out more about the latest campaigns to connect consumers with rights holders, reports Anthea Sarris.

Several initiatives around the world are striving to connect the consumers of creative and cultural product with its creators and rights holders. Their common goal is the promotion of key values, such as respect for copyright and fair remuneration for the commercial use of creative content.

At the dedicated focus session ‘Connecting creators and consumers’ at the World Copyright Summit, several of these innovative campaigns were presented.

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Copyright Alliance (US) (www.copyrightalliance.org) Sandra Aistars, Executive Director of Copyright Alliance, shared with Summit delegates the grassroots educational work being done by the Washington, DC-based cross-industry organisation.

The Copyright Alliance is a non-profit, non-partisan educational body dedicated to the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs and growth. Following a survey of the resources available to educators on the key issues of creators’ rights and the creative industries, the Copyright Alliance set up the Education Foundation to develop a comprehensive suite of materials to support primary and secondary school teachers.

“Because of the successful lobbying efforts of the Copyright Alliance, its membership and other organisations, there are now requirements in some 31 of the 50 states to teach some sort of copyright education or digital citizenship as part of the curricula,” Aistars said. But she explained that, despite the requirement to teach about these issues, teachers do not always have access to material to do so.

As a result, the Education Foundation created an educational kit for teachers. The initial roll-out in 2009 reached 76,000-plus educators in all 50 US states, delivering targeted materials to be used in compulsory copyright and digital-citizenship curriculum modules.

“This has been an incredibly successful effort for us,” Aistars said, who concluded her World Copyright Summit presentation by issuing a call to arms: “We, as a creative community, need to… set aside our differences and instead come together around the very important issue of protecting copyright as an engine of creativity and innovation in our communities. We are far out-numbered and far out-funded by those who oppose us on these sorts of issues. So we really need to come together on these issues.”

Music Matters (UK) (www.whymusicmatters.org) The Music Matters campaign unites artists, audiences and all those who work in and around music to remind listeners of its enduring value. Music Matters highlights the profound value and significance of music and educates consumers on how to identify and obtain music from legitimate sources.

The driving forces behind Music Matters — Niamh Byrne, who is in charge of creative content strategy at Universal Music UK, and Fred Bolza, Vice President of Marketing Services at Sony Music Entertainment UK — provided an overview of the campaign, highlighting the use of compelling content to support the ethical consumption of music product.

“The basic game of this campaign was to create something compelling that would engage with real music fans and use a language they understood that really was about music,” Byrne said. Added Bolza: “We tried to get people to engage with music rather than with copyright and use that engagement to try to explain. But we also wanted to create a trust mark around Music Matters and tell people that, if there is this brand, it is a legitimate place to purchase music and that the artists eventually get paid. It’s like Fair Trade coffee. That’s the general idea.”

From emotive films telling the stories behind songs and their creators to the trust mark that helps UK music consumers to find their way to legitimate online sources of music, the Music Matters campaign has started to make a real difference in the UK. Now, local campaigns are also planned for Australia, New Zealand and Mexico.

“We [have] had a lot of interest from overseas,” Byrne said. And more artists are now giving their support, because “they like the tone of our campaigns”, Byrne added.

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Childnet International (www.childnet-int.org) Childnet International’s Director of Policy & Communications, Lucinda Fell, introduced delegates to the work of this non-profit organisation, whose mission is to educate children and their parents on the risks associated with internet use, including respect for creators’ rights.

“We work to make the internet a great and safe place,” Fell said, mostly through awareness campaigns. “Keeping up with what children are doing online can be incredibly challenging for parents,” she added. “Very often, they don’t feel confident talking about the issues that they are faced with. Parents have a massive knowledge gap when it comes to talking about copyright with their children.”

Partnering with the Pro-Music Alliance and record labels’ global body IFPI, Childnet has produced a guide for parents and teachers to help address the knowledge gap between them and their children/pupils. “The leaflet tells you what you can do and what you cannot do to stay legal,” Fell explained.

Originally launched in 2005, the leaflet is now into its third edition and more than half a million copies have been printed, with multiple international editions in production. “We believe that it is very very important that parents and carers have the right information and the right knowledge to be able to protect their children,” Fell concluded.

HADOPI (France) (www.hadopi.fr) HADOPI President Marie-Francoise Marais set out to change the perception of her organisation as the “gendarmes du net” (the net’s cops).

HADOPI was formed in France in 2010 in the wake of the law introducing a graduated-response system to address online copyright theft. To date, more than 400,000 initial-infringement notifications (step one) and 4,500 secondary notifications (step two) have been issued. The third step — referral to public prosecution — was yet to be activated at the time of the Summit.

“Illegal downloading has massive social repercussions,” Marais said. In parallel to graduated response, HADOPI has worked with an advertising agency to develop a proactive education campaign targeted at pre-adolescents, and their parents and grandparents. Using the tagline ‘La création de demain se défend aujourd’hui’ (‘Tomorrow’s creation needs to be defended today’), an integrated campaign of posters, videos and web, TV and cinema promotions was rolled out in France before the summer.

“What we want to achieve is [to] develop awareness, make sure there is information and make people feel responsible,” Marais added. “This is what we want to do, rather than punish. This awareness and responsible attitude is what we want to promote.”

Danish Consumer Council (Denmark) (download.taenk.dk) The Danish Consumer Council, a non-profit NGO, has proactively sought to connect consumers directly with creators and legitimate sources of their content.

Danish Consumer Council Chief Counsel Martin Salamon set the scene: “The main reasons people are not buying your [music] products are, first, that it must not be more difficult to download music from a legal site than it is from an illegal site; and, second, there is a large degree of insecurity among consumers about what is legal and what is illegal.”

In response to this challenge, the Council has created a website that aggregates all legitimate sources of online content, categorised by access models, giving consumers the ultimate, user-friendly interface to select the option of their choice.

According to Salamon, the site has enjoyed great success in its first year of operation. The Council is now working with Danish authors’ society KODA and IFPI to expand the service and add information about legal-streaming services.

Salamon added that it was important that consumers realised that creators need be paid in order for the creative process to continue. “There is a lot for consumers’ organisations and for rights-holders organisations to do things together in this field,” he concluded.

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 12:30 PM

Super Session: Creators’ voice – Fair deals for audiovisual creators Ray Bennett, Andrew Chowns, Dariusz Jablonski, Gerhard Pfennig, Jean-Paul Salomé, Imanol Uribe

From left to right: Ray Bennett, Andrew Chowns, Dariusz Jablonski, Gerhard Pfennig, Jean‐Paul Salomé, Imanol Uribe

Speakers: Andrew Chowns, CEO, Directors UK (UK) Dariusz Jablonski, Film producer and director / Founding-member of the Association of Film Directors and Producers of Poland / President, Apple Film Production (Poland) Gerhard Pfennig, President of the Board, SAA (Society of Audiovisual Authors) / CEO, Bild-Kunst (Germany) Jean-Paul Salomé, screenwriter and film director (France) Imanol Uribe, film director, screenwriter and producer (Spain) Moderator: Ray Bennett, Contributing Editor and Writer, Cue Entertainment / UK Film and Theatre Critic, The Hollywood Reporter (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

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Audiovisual authors plead for fair remuneration Audiovisual experts and creators at the World Copyright Summit urged the European Commission to set up a regional legal framework for the use of works in the digital field, reports Juliana Koranteng.

Before digital technology outruns legislative development in the online world, it has become urgent for Europe to set up a new legislative framework that would take into account the most recent developments in the field and protect the rights of creators and producers.

This was the view of the speakers participating in the session ‘Creators’ voice — fair deal for audiovisual creators’ at the World Copyright Summit.

Currently, the organisation of audiovisual rights online varies from country to country, and harmonisation of some kind is vital if artists are to be compensated for the use of their works on the digital platforms, said Gerhard Pfennig, CEO of Germany’s Bild-Kunst and President of the Board of Europe’s Society of Audiovisual Authors (SAA). SAA is proposing a solution, namely the introduction of a remuneration right for the AV author in case the works are exploited by an online service.

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Asked by moderator Ray Bennett, Contributing Editor and Writer at Cue Entertainment and UK Film and Theatre Critic for The Hollywood Reporter, what would be the ideal legal set up, Pfennig responded: “There is already one directive on the rental and lending of works, which requires authors to be remunerated if others are exploiting their works. We need such a directive for online rights.”

A single law for a single European market would improve matters significantly, Pfennig added. “It will take into account what’s going on in Italy, Spain and France, and help countries like Germany and Austria, which do not have an elaborate remuneration system,” he said.

Fair remuneration This proposal was met with unanimous approval by the rest of the panel. Film producer Dariusz Jablonski, President of Poland’s Apple Film Production, reported that, in Poland, copyright law categorises everyone who contributes anything to a film as an author, entitling each one to a share of the remuneration.

“Internet piracy is a huge problem,” Jablonski asserted, adding that fair remuneration for online usage is also paramount, making a European legal framework a necessity. “And we have to be very quick in establishing this legal framework,” he warned.

Without such a legal framework, argued Andrew Chowns, CEO of the British guild Directors UK, film and TV directors’ works could disappear into the internet’s digital maze because some broadcasters would acquire both the TV and online rights, making it “difficult to extract the value of the online element”. Chowns also agreed that “time was of the essence” in this case, and that such legislation should be implemented as soon as possible. Chowns added: “I think it will be a test of the EU to bring it about as quickly as possible. But, in our favour, this seems to be very clearly an issue about creating a proper single market, because these services are transacted across boundaries very seamlessly and it goes to the heart of the principle of fair remuneration for authors. So we are playing to some strong themes.”

For his part, Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer Imanol Uribe fully backed the notion of pan-European legislation that would introduce the concept of remuneration for authors, regardless of the use of their works. “In Spain, we have established the principle that authors should benefit from all the exploitations of their works,” Uribe said. “And in 2006, we asked for the rights to be extended for usage on the internet and through digital carriers, which was done in subsequent legislation.”

But, Uribe pointed out, the future is no longer about the local market, but about the European landscape. He therefore asked for the principle of a right to remuneration to be a European right. “It already exists in Italy and in Poland and, to some extent, in France and Belgium,” he said. “Our fight will be to make it recognised at a European level.”

Invest in cinema The lack of pan-European legislation that protects filmmakers in the digital landscape also weakens their position during negotiations with major global content users, such as the US digital platforms iTunes or Netflix, Jablonski added.

“There is no European institution big enough to negotiate [with them for] a fair deal,” he said. “In the next few years, the market will be divided among several global players and, after that, it will be even more difficult to negotiate with them.”

French screenwriter/filmmaker Jean-Paul Salomé pointed out that the French system requires new forms of exploitation — from broadcasters through DVD distribution to pay-TV — to invest in movie production. “You now need to explain to the new players on the internet that exploitation of cinema isn’t free,” he declared.

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Salomé, who was then Vice-President of France’s filmmakers’ body ARP (he was elected President of the organization on July 5, 2011), said that the audiovisual sector in France was a bit like a “spoilt child”, because French collecting societies are very efficient and make sure that each new format or means of distribution remunerates authors. In addition, each new media has an obligation to invest in cinema. “This system is shaken by new players who do not come from the same culture,” he added.

“Therefore, we have to explain to these ISPs or telecoms companies that, if they want to show movies through their networks, it is not free. We try to get them to invest into cinema and, so far, we have always succeeded in doing so.” He suggested that the mechanisms that exist in France should be extended on a pan-European basis.

The best way to fight against piracy, in Salomé’s view, would be to create legal services in Europe and oblige the operators of those services to contribute to the economy of the system. He added that one of the main problems in Europe is the lack of circulation of works between countries. To address this issue, European platforms are needed.

However, Salomé cautioned about copying the US platform Netflix. “When [European Commissioner for Digital Agenda] Neelie Kroes talks [in her World Copyright Summit keynote] about the need to create platforms like Netflix in Europe, we applaud on the principle,” he said. “But we add that we would like them to be European, not Netflix itself. If we copy the Netflix system in Europe, I strongly believe that we authors, we will be dead. They will certainly sign deals with European studios, but authors will get lost in the process.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 14:00 PM

Keynote Conversation: Taking control of the digital challenges Robert Levine interviewed by Brett Cottle

Robert Levine (L) & Brett Cottle (R)

Keynote speaker: Robert Levine, author of “Free Ride - How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back” (USA) Interviewed by: Brett Cottle, CEO, APRA / AMCOS (Australia) Link to: [Video and article]

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Levine: ‘Copyright is the engine of free expression’ The World Copyright Summit saw US journalist Robert Levine turn his attention to the ‘freetard’ culture, which he believes continues to undermine the content and media industries, Nicola Slade reports.

Robert Levine is not afraid of taking on the ‘copy-left’ movement. The former Billboard and Wired journalist is the author of the forthcoming book ‘Free Ride - How Digital Parasites Are Destroying The Culture Business, And How The Culture Business Can Fight Back’ (Random House), in which he documents the way the ‘freetard’ culture has dominated the debate over the internet.

In his session ‘Taking control of the digital challenges’ — a keynote discussion with Brett Cottle, CEO of Australia’s societies APRA/AMCOS — Levine struck a chord with the World Copyright Summit’s audience when he observed that: “The anti-copyright lobby made the successful argument that freedom of content means freedom of expression. But, the way I see it, copyright is the engine of free expression.”

Levine came across as a particularly engaging character. Full of bold, well-researched assertions, he delivered his thoughts and opinions with wit and elegance. He explained to Cottle, who praised his book and suggested it was “compulsory reading”, that the inspiration had been to write a story, “albeit a tragic one”.

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Cottle lifted a quote from Levine’s book, which stated that protection for content in the US — particularly under the legal practice of ‘fair use’ — is merely theoretical, rather than practical.

Although now obvious to most, Levine explained how he arrived at that conclusion. “I started to think about the beginning of the story,” he said. “The beginning, as I see it in the US, was the creation of the DMCA, or ‘notice and take-downs’, which can end up being a full-time job for a creator. At the same time, in 1998, there was a term extension passed and it aroused a lot of anger among those who are anti-copyright. But the problem for me on the internet is, if you look at what’s really happening — not what’s theoretical, but what’s really happening — copyright protection doesn’t last 70 years, it last seven seconds.”

He continued: “Whatever protection I have [as a creator] needs to be real protection and right now there is no law which does that. If you look at the internet, the problem isn’t that there is some piracy.

The problem is that there isn’t really a functioning market.”

Unregulated market Cottle asked Levine whether he thought the problems faced by the music business were a consequence of its own short-term thinking, stupidity or bad luck. “When I wrote the music chapter, I thought of it as a counter-narrative,” Levine replied. “There are a few things everybody knows and I put this in quotes: record labels are greedy; they hate the future; they cheat artists, etc, etc... A lot of that is either not true, or nowhere near as true as it’s made out to be.”

He added: “What I found interesting was the way in which the TV and movie industries said they wouldn’t make the same mistakes as the music industry. But no one could really identify what those mistakes were — aside from some bad PR mistakes. If someone finds a way to give away what you’re selling, you don’t have much of a business without legal recourse. And there isn’t any real legal recourse.”

Levine concluded: “How can one business be considered ‘stupid’ when now they are all suffering with the same problems? This is what an unregulated system does to the economy — it eats it up.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 14:15 PM

Panel Discussion: The dos and don’ts of licensing Richard Conlon, Ben Drury, Tom Frederikse, Justin Kalifowitz, Jakob Hüttel, Emmanuel Legrand

From left to right: Emmanuel Legrand, Richard Conlon, Ben Drury, Tom Frederikse, Justin Kalifowitz, Jakob Hüttel

Speakers: Richard Conlon, Senior VP, Corporate Strategy, Communications & New Media, BMI (USA) Ben Drury, CEO, 7digital (UK) Tom Frederikse, Solicitor and Attorney, Clintons (UK) Justin Kalifowitz, President, Downtown Music Publishing (USA) Jakob Hüttel, Head of Legal and International Affairs, KODA (Denmark) Moderator: Emmanuel Legrand, independent journalist, Legrand Network (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

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Time to rewrite the licensing rulebook?

A World Copyright Summit panel agreed that the licensing situation is improving and there is a better understanding of both licensors’ and licensees’ needs. But practical solutions are still required to cope with today' rapidly evolving licensing environment, writes Adrian Crookes.

The pace of technological change has ripped up the licensing rulebook and left in its wake a narrative that charts the difficulties that new services face in licensing music for both local and global exploitation.

The World Copyright Summit session, ‘The dos and don’ts of licensing’, brought together a crossindustry group of speakers to share their knowledge of the licensing process and to discuss digital licensing best practice.

In producing a list of dos and don’ts to help prospective service launches, the panellists were in agreement that preparation and patience are the two key requirements. Richard Conlon, Senior VP, Corporate Strategy, Communications and New Media at the US collecting society BMI, explained how his organisation would expect to start with a mapping project that identified all of the rights the new service required and that recognised those areas that might be problematic.

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“It’s an imperfect process,” he said, “so agree on what you can agree on [to get the money flowing] and put to one side what you need to discuss.”

Accept that it is not going to be a speedy process, added Ben Drury, CEO of the UK online music service 7digital. “It’s just not a settled environment,” he said. “Technology is moving faster than the licensing process and you just have to accept that, if you’re not Apple or Google with an army of lawyers, it’s going to be difficult to do.”

Complex system Lawyer Tom Frederikse, a partner at the British firm Clintons, agreed that licensing musical works is not always easy. “It can be daunting at first [for digital start-ups],” he acknowledged. But he had praise, too, for the way in which publishers and societies has approached the issue of pan-European licensing over the last five years. “You have a lot to be proud of — it’s improved enormously,” he said, referring to the recent collection of repertoire in collecting-society ‘hubs’.

Frederikse also suggested that a map of the landscape would be a useful tool for start-ups, to show them exactly what licenses they need in given scenarios.

Conlon agreed that music licensing has not been helped by the complexity of the system that has developed around it. “There are wars going on about which rates apply where,” he said, “and that’s frustrating to licensees.” He referred, for example, to the different perspectives in the US and Europe over the value of the performing right in a download. “With our own internecine warfare in who gets what, we’ve created cracks in our creative façade that will hurt us long term,” he concluded.

Justin Kalifowitz, President of Downtown Music Publishing in the US, agreed. “We can’t blame it on the technology companies,” he said. “Services aren’t reaching their full potential because the licensing matrix is a nightmare.”

Moderator Emmanuel Legrand asked if the recent trend for more direct licensing by publishers had introduced further complexity into the system. Could this model be sustained alongside the more blanket-licensing approach that publishers have traditionally taken through collecting societies?

“It’s not sustainable for us to license everything directly,” Kalifowitz said. “And the collecting-society system provides a good solution.” The key to the system working more efficiently, he felt, was to solve the data issue “by working with the societies to create a global framework”.

Five learnings Jakob Hüttel, Head of Legal and International Affairs at Denmark’s society KODA, thought that the key to a digital service becoming a truly global player was to understand local markets. And it was here that the collecting societies provided an important link.

“If you want to be truly present globally, you have to go local to each market,” Hüttel said. “We know our markets and we’ll share what we know with users who want to enter our market. We can connect you to people we know and we can ensure the business model will be sound for all parties.” This partnership approach has been key to the success of KODA’s licensing system, he added.

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Legrand summed up the five key discussion points from the session, which could form a blueprint for digital licensing: 1) Act local, think global. Create cost-efficient solutions by using the available licensing hubs and see what local territories can offer in terms of connections that can help build your digital business.

2) Be reactive. Accept that the times are changing rapidly and expect to adjust accordingly.

3) Identify the works you need (licensee) and know who to pay (licensor). As a licensee, you will only need the recording masters you intend to use. However, you will also need a publishing licence for everything to avoid unnecessary risk. As a licensor, accuracy of data is the top of the agenda.

4) Understand each other’s needs. Work in partnership to provide solutions.

5) Be flexible. Both licensor and licensee need to remain flexible throughout the licensing process.

Do the homework The panellists offered a final set of licensing tips when Legrand asked them to share what was on their mind at the start of the licensing process: “Getting to know each other,” ventured Hüttel.

“Come prepared,” said Kalifowitz.

Frederikse was more specific: “See the overall picture for your chosen territory so you don’t enter into licensing discussions and then discover your business model doesn’t work.”

“Be realistic in your expectations of the time it’s going to take. Be patient,” Drury said, while Conlon suggested: “Be committed to getting it done.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 15:00 PM

Keynote Conversation: Modernising copyright for digital media: The broadcasters’ approach Jean-Paul Philippot, interviewed by Janine Lorente

Keynote speaker: Jean-Paul Philippot, President, EBU-UER (European Broadcasting Union) / Administrator General, RTBF (Radio télévision belge de la communauté française) (Belgium) Interviewed by: Janine Lorente, Vice-Chair of CISAC Board of Directors / Deputy Director General, SACD (France) Link to: [Video and article]

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Philippot: ‘We need a clear, transparent and collective solution’ The President of the European Broadcasting Union, Jean-Paul Philippot, told the World Copyright Summit that broadcasters and rights holders have a common interest — and should work together to capitalise on it, Rémi Bouton reports.

Europe’s public broadcasters are facing opportunities and challenges in the new digital environment that require a joint approach with creators and their societies. The proposal to set up “a coalition of the willing” was put forward by Jean-Paul Philippot, the President of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU-UER), in his World Copyright Summit keynote conversation, “Modernising copyright for digital media: the broadcasters’ approach”.

“We are broadcasters and we are also producers of works. We see the changes [in the digital environment] as opportunities, because audiovisual works are made to be broadcast, and new means of consuming images are new opportunities to circulate works,” said Philippot, who is also in charge of RTBF, Belgium’s French-speaking public-service broadcaster.

He continued: “But there are also menaces and we share them with all rights holders, especially authors. The main problem we face is how to protect works and their authors, and ensure proper remuneration for the use of works. Another risk is that new players who are not investors in programmes will capture some of our business without re-investing in the production of work. We are already seeing this happen. And last, we see it as a necessity that all citizens are given wide and unrestricted access to all this content.”

Philippot’s comments should be put in the context of a changing world, which has moved from territorial broadcasting and rights allocation to an environment in which audiovisual works are available online or on mobile phones, with no territorial restrictions.

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A key partner Janine Lorente, Vice-Chair of CISAC’s Board of Directors and Deputy Director General of France’s SACD, reminded the audience that the EBU is a key player in the audiovisual world, contributing significantly to the revenues collected by authors and their societies.

“EBU represents 85 members who are European public radio and television networks, broadcasting to an average of 650 million weekly listeners and viewers,” said Lorente, who summarised the role of the EBU as “a key partner for authors, since it is a major investor in creation and production”.

Philippot added that EBU’s members invest up to €10 billion a year in programmes. “In fact, it is even more than that if you take in account the leverage effect,” he added, citing a BBC study showing that, for every £1 invested in programmes, £2 is actually brought into the TV industry.

EBU members, Philippot continued, are keen to spread their wings into new areas, but would like to see broadcasters, connected-TV services and device manufacturers abide by certain guidelines: interoperability between devices and services; direct access without filters to TV channels or radio stations; and respect for the integrity of channels and programming. “For example, we cannot accept the integration of logos or advertising into our programmes, for obvious economical and deontological reasons,” Philippot said.

Asked about the EBU’s view of such services as Netflix and Google TV, Philippot said that the organisation has not yet adopted a unified position because the arrival in Europe of these operators has been delayed. “We have a position on hybrid TV,” he said. “But Google and Netflix are not in that category and there is still work to do.”

Need for new regulations To clarify these matters, the EBU is calling upon European policy-makers to provide a legal framework that would establish the rules regarding the legality of broadcasting rights on all platforms, as well as the need to reinvest into production and guarantee diversity of programming.

“There is an urgency — and we see it as a European priority — to clarify the legal framework,” Philippot stated. “We ask that the question of territoriality is finally resolved. We need a system that will allow us to have one single license for the whole of Europe. We have been working for the past 10 years in some sort of haze that is not beneficial to anyone.”

Meanwhile, EBU members face the daunting mission of digitising their archives — a mind-boggling th task involving 28 million hours of programmes covering the 20 century. “There is no viable economic model that would allow us to comprehensively digitise these archives,” Philippot said. “We need specific, one-off public financing to do so. But we are also facing a huge legal problem because, at the time these programmes were conceived, they were not meant to be broadcast on demand.”

Philippot pointed to a recent BBC study showing that the simple clearance of all the rights to the UK public broadcaster’s programmes would cost £72 million in salaries alone. “We need to find economic and legal solutions, otherwise we will lose this heritage, this memory, or it will circulate as pirate material,” he added.

“You have our support on these issues,” said Lorente, acknowledging that the fragmentation of rights complicates the work of broadcasters, especially when they plan to show these heritage programmes on their websites. She noted that, each week, 200,000 musical works are broadcast by each EBU member and that every audiovisual work relates to 50 or 100 different rights owners.

“We are in favour of an extended system of collective licensing that will have the benefit of creating a framework that will safeguard our rights and limit both the number of players and the number of transactions,” Philippot said, adding that such system would speed up the process and facilitate legal access to content. He observed that, on these issues, EBU and CISAC as well as other groups of rights holders have been able to work out joint positions. “We are in favour of a clear, transparent and collective solution,” Philippot concluded.

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 15:20 PM

Panel Discussion: The Cloud… What it means for rights owners and tech companies Robert Ashcroft, Antony Bebawi, John LoFrumento, Jeremy Silver

From left to right : Jeremy Silver, Robert Ashcroft, Antony Bebawi, John LoFrumento

Speakers: Robert Ashcroft, Chief Executive, PRS for Music (UK) Antony Bebawi, General Counsel Europe, EMI Music Publishing (UK) John LoFrumento, CEO, ASCAP (USA) Moderator: Jeremy Silver, CEO, Mediaclarity (UK) Link to: [Video and article]

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The cloud meets creative content: stormy weather or silver lining?

What does the ‘cloud’ mean for rights holders? And what does the industry make of these new digital services? A panel of legal experts attempted to provide answers at the World Copyright Summit, writes Anthea Sarris.

Hot on the heels of Apple’s launch of its iCloud service and a few weeks after Amazon and Google announced their respective cloud projects, the World Copyright Summit gathered a panel of industry experts to explore the potential — and the pitfalls — presented by the new service model.

Kicking off the session ‘The Cloud… What it means for rights owners and tech companies’, moderator Jeremy Silver, CEO of Mediaclarity, provided a clear definition of cloud computing and its relevance for the content industries.

“What is all that cloud computing stuff and why is it so controversial?” asked Silver. “It is essentially a set of servers that exists not in your office or your home, but remotely and on which files can be stored or can be accessed. The ingredient that goes with that is the ability to mirror these servers around the globe so that, when people use these servers, they can use the servers closer to them and make the most efficient use of bandwidth. The particular aspect that interests us is the locker service in the cloud.”

Silver outlined the progress of cloud computing with particular reference to Amazon and Google’s music-related digital-locker services that were launched earlier this year — without seeking licenses from rights holders. In addition, Apple launched its iCloud service with licenses from the four major labels and music publishers.

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“So what are the implications of these new services and how are they going to impact on rights owners?” Silver asked, highlighting the main consumer benefit, which is the ability to have access to content, regardless of location, and not simply through a hard drive at home or in the office.

Crushed enthusiasm John LoFrumento, CEO of US’ society ASCAP, suggested that cloud services could be one of the answers to today’s rights conundrum, providing a solution for both consumers and rights holders. But he warned that the cloud services could also try to search for legal loopholes. “I was enthusiastic and excited [when cloud services launched], because one thing our members want is for their works to be made available,” LoFrumento said. “That enthusiasm was crushed when Amazon and Google suggested that they were in the neighborhood of privacy and therefore there were no rights that needed to be paid for.”

LoFrumento put forward the 15-year struggle with the cable-TV industry that ultimately resulted in a positive outcome for rights holders as a precedent for the discussions ahead. “So I don’t feel this is too new for us,” he added. “We will protect our members’ rights. This means that we have another fight on our hands.”

For LoFrumento, there is no doubt that, according to US law, if there is a transmission, there is a public performance, whether it is done on a delayed basis, simultaneously or one by one. By this definition, locker services fall within the legal framework. “We believe that there is an opportunity here for both sides to get together and discuss the nature of the rights within these new services and how we go forward,” he said. “We do not want to interfere with cloud technology — we embrace it — but we want them to embrace us as being worthy of getting fair compensation.”

In LoFrumento’s opinion, the uploading of music to a locker and the accessing of that music constitute “new use not original use” and should therefore be compensated. “We don’t believe that the platform defines the rights. We believe the rights have been defined and should be paid for,” he added.

So, asked Silver, should Apple go to ASCAP to obtain a license for iCloud? “We would hope so, but they don’t — we have to go to them,” LoFrumento answered.

Access model Robert Ashcroft, CEO of UK authors’ society PRS for Music, highlighted the important distinction between passive and active cloud services with functionalities such as playlists and recommendations. “The distinction between a streaming service and a cloud service is that you have first to acquire the content [for a cloud service],” said Ashcroft. Highlighting the challenges faced by the music industry, he went on to say that cloud locker services could very quickly morph. “It’s not going to take very long for that [repertoire] to be available with a single click of your mouse from a pirate service,” he explained.

If that were to develop, Ashcroft said, it would represent “unfair competition” for all the legal streaming services that have launched recently. He also added that, for rights holders, there would be a significant knock-on effect from a subscription service costing $10 per month and a locker service costing $2 per month.

“You are not competing on a level playing field if you are competing with something which is one fifth of the price,” said Ashcroft, noting that, for the system to work, all the players would have to be licensed fairly.

For Antony Bebawi, General Counsel for Europe at EMI Music Publishing, the cloud is part of the evolution of the music industry. “People are now evolving from a digital-ownership model to an access model,” he said. “The cloud is the bridge between ownership and subscription and, to my point of view, it is effectively a limited type of subscription model. It’s all about getting the consumer into the habit of not owning something.”

He added: “I think the cloud is part of moving people along the path away from downloading to accessing things remotely via a range of devices. This is just an evolutionary step.”

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At a crossroad Bebawi thought it was the responsibility of rights holders, such as publishers and collecting societies, to make sure they secured enough value from the use of repertoire. “We believe that music has value,” he added.

“We are at a crossroad,” Ashcroft concluded. “This is the most important thing happening in the industry. Is the cloud a new era for music that delivers high quality music at a fair price, ubiquitously available, with full meta-data, new recommendation engines and users’ interfaces, finally capturing the full potential of online? Or are we about to undermine the legal services that are licensed but not yet profitable, because they will no longer be competing on a level playing field?”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 16:10 PM

Super Session: Creators’ voice - In my world… Jean Michel Jarre Jean-Michel Jarre, Interviewed by Patrick Rackow

Patrick Rackow (L) & Jean‐Michel Jarre(R)

Keynote speaker: Jean-Michel Jarre, author, composer and performer / Member of SACEM (France) Interviewed by: Patrick Rackow, CEO, British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) (UK)

Link to: [Video and article]

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Jarre: “Authors’ rights are the most timeless rights” Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre is certainly not a technophobe. But he questions how the new digital order is treating creators, Nicola Slade discovers.

Jean-Michel Jarre has always dabbled in new technology, so it comes as no surprise to learn that he feels “at ease” with the digital revolution.

However, in his World Copyright Summit keynote discussion with Patrick Rackow, CEO of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), the 60 million album-selling electronic music pioneer admitted that technology has also created a set of problems for the creative industries.

“History shows that we [creators] have always depended on technology: catching three minutes on a 78, being played on jukeboxes — the singles industry came because of that,” said Jarre, who took time away from his current world tour to address the Summit. “More or less — now more than less — we depend on technology and digital technology has created a lot of hopes, lots of problems. But we can create whoever we are: writers, film-makers and obviously musicians.”

He added: “Always being involved with electronic music, I feel quite at ease with technology and I felt quite at ease when the digital era came along. But why we are here today in Brussels is because it creates quite a lot of problems in the way we distribute our work. We can survive also, vis-à-vis the new ways of touching not only consumers, but our friends and fans.”

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Creating the buzz In answer to Rackow’s question as to whether the changes in distribution methods have affected the art form itself, Jarre said: “The amount of time we focus on things has evolved, but it doesn’t mean we should only watch short films and pieces of music less than 30 seconds. I think we can touch our audience, but it has changed... It [has] changed economically, as we know, but we can use the internet to create a buzz — excitement — and be in direct contact with the people who listen.”

The central question, he continued, is how artists can achieve “sustainable” careers in the new digital marketplace: “To get people excited about a new project online is quite easy — magical, in fact — but it’s how to make sure you last, how you survive... That’s what we have to invent in the next few years.”

Where some might say that the ultimate problem facing creators is the issue of ‘free’, Jarre is equally concerned that we have lost our personal “relationship with sounds”. He believes that people are now more obsessed with acquiring content — “like archivists” — than getting pleasure from the music itself.

“Once upon a time, you would put your hi-fi in the middle of room — move it in before the furniture or the carpets! But now we place less and less importance on how we can enjoy the music and have a personal relationship with sounds. It’s not a political problem; not the responsibility of politicians. We all need to restore our relationship with music.”

Moreover, Jarre blames the music industry for this loss of connection: “Step by step, the music industry didn’t understand the evolution of society. The industry that invented pirate radio a number of years later wants to put pirates in jail — and suddenly they became totally square and old-fashioned.

They lost this groovy and trendy relationship with kids and teenagers.”

Make maximum noise Jarre stressed the importance of respecting the authors’ rights. “I [have been] quite shocked [over] the past 10-15 years to see how the authors’ rights societies like SACEM, GEMA and PRS have been treated by the business, as well as some authors, who consider them old-fashioned systems or entities which have a total retro and wrong view about how the relationship between rights and creation should evolve,” he said. “I say I’m shocked, because authors’ rights are the most timeless rights. It’s for one unique reason — it’s linked to the creation itself. This will be the only way of getting some money for the creator and this should be cherished.”

Concluding the interview, Jarre said: “We have to make maximum noise and speak with one clear voice so that those companies who make billions of dollars off our backs give us the money we need to continue.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 16:30PM

Panel Discussion: Collective management Solution provider for the digital economy David Arnold, Kerstin Jorna, Bernard Miyet, Ralph Peer, Ralph Simon, Sami Valkonen, Magdalena Vinent, Peter Weber

From left to right: Ralph Simon, David Arnold, Kerstin Jorna, Bernard Miyet, Ralph Peer, Sami Valkonen, Magdalena Vinent, Peter Weber

Speakers: David Arnold, film music composer (James Bond, Stargate, Independence Day…) (UK) Kerstin Jorna, Deputy Head of Cabinet of Michel Barnier, Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, European Commission (Belgium) Bernard Miyet, President, GESAC (European Grouping of Societies of Authors and Composers) / Chairman of the Management Board, SACEM (France) Ralph Peer, CEO, peermusic (USA) Sami Valkonen, Head of International Music Licensing, Android, Google (USA) Magdalena Vinent, President, IFRRO / Director General, CEDRO (Spain) Peter Weber, Chairman of the Legal and Public Affairs Committee, EBU-UER (European Broadcasting Union) / Vice Director Legal Affairs, ZDF (Germany) Moderator: Ralph Simon, Founder & Chairman Emeritus, Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas (USA) Link to: [Video and article]

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Collective management voted fit for purpose Collective management was deemed fit for the challenges of the 21st century by an expert panel at the World Copyright Summit. But Europe’s creative sectors and users need a reliable legal framework, writes Juliana Koranteng.

On the World Copyright Summit panel ‘Collective management – solution provider for the digital economy’, participants agreed that the present system is appropriate for the new digital world.

The consensus was that, with collective management, creators can focus on producing their works, while societies can concentrate on administering their rights and collecting remuneration. Additionally, content users have contact points for the required licences, which ensure that consumers have access to a wide choice of creative works.

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Moderator Ralph Simon, Founder & Chairman Emeritus of the Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas and CEO of Mobilium International, kicked off the proceedings by asking British film and TV-score composer David Arnold (‘James Bond’; ‘Stargate’; ‘Independence Day’), what collective management represented for him. “As a composer or a writer, you spend most of your life isolated from everyone,” Arnold replied. “We, as the party that provides content, rely on everybody else to get the business part right.”

Arnold noted that the commissioning fees paid for television programmes, even for primetime shows, are “incredibly low”. As a result, composers like him, whose works are broadcast and used around the world, are “absolutely reliant” on the collective-management system that allows creators to earn revenues from the use of their works. “It is hugely important that this aspect is taken care of,” Arnold added.

However, multi-market licensing and royalties collection for works used on the internet remain contentious issues, especially in the 27-state European Union (EU). The region is supposed to be one internal market with harmonised regulations and legislation for the free movement of products and services. But there is still no single contact point for managing rights, licensing and royalties collection.

Win-win solution Now, the collective management of rights is going to be central to the EU’s proposed directive on intellectual property (IP), according to Kerstin Jorna, Deputy Head of Cabinet for Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s Internal Market and Services Commissioner. “Collective management,” Jorna said, “is part of a wider strategy covering intellectual property and copyright in order to reap the benefits of the internet and technological developments.”

Jorna acknowledged that there was “a very old and very strong tradition” of collective management in Europe”. “This continent sticks out when you look at the amount of rights that are administered collectively,” she said, describing collective management as “a win-win solution”.

She elaborated: “It’s a win for the authors, who can concentrate on the creative side and let others take care of promoting, selling and licensing the works, and collecting the remunerations and paying them back to creators. And it’s a win for the users, especially those who use a lot of works like broadcasters, because they have a single point in collecting societies. The system as such is efficient and reduces transaction costs.”

Jorna added that she did not see any reasons why collective management should not be the system of choice for the internet era. She referred to the draft legislation that is expected to be presented to the European Parliament between next year and 2013, which aims to provide a uniform structure for multi-territory copyright administration. “What we will present is an enabling framework,” she said.

Referring to collecting societies, Jorna added: “Today, there is a strong tradition of being efficient within your territory, but not so when dealing beyond your territory. [This is] due to the different laws and practices in certain member states, including some that are quasi-monopolies for certain categories of rights. What we want to achieve with our proposal is to make it possible for rights holders to get together to license works and repertoire together at a single contact point and as the users want it. That should be possible and that should be facilitated.”

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Pan-European licensing Creators and societies’ representatives on the panel stressed the importance of being consulted before any related EU law is finalised. Bernard Miyet, President of the European Grouping of Societies of Authors and Composers (GESAC) and Chairman of the Management Board of France’s Sacem, welcomed the principle of a consultation which, he said, contrasted positively with the way in which the Commission had treated these issues and collective-management organisations over the past decade.

Pan-European licensing is not only possible, but is done on a regular basis in Europe, Miyet pointed out. He explained that Sacem, alongside its sister societies across Europe, has been licensing extensively for pan-European use of repertoire, including to key players such as the Apple iTunes online music store, which was licensed by Sacem back in 2004.

Illustrating the flexibility of the collective-management organisations, Miyet said that a service like YouTube, rather than asking for pan-European licenses, was instead looking for blanket licenses on a territory-by-territory basis, which societies could provide, alongside publishers.

But Miyet also warned against being too dogmatic in trying to find solutions. “A one-size-fits-all licensing system is complicated,” he cautioned. “There are users who want national and blanket licences, some [who] just want a multi-territory licence based on language and others [who] might need a licence that covers other regions of the world where rights are badly protected.”

Miyet explained how online music represents only 1.5% of Sacem’s revenues and yet the data processing for digital music takes up more time and space than the processing of music used via the traditional media platforms. He suggested that, in future, there should be only one centre in Europe to process data. “There is a need for co-operation [among societies] for economy of scale,” he added, noting that Sacem has spent some €70 million building a state-of-the-art IT system over the past eight years.

Greater efficiencies The duplication of EU societies’ back-office services, such as the data processing of licensing, is indeed a waste of money, agreed Ralph Peer, CEO of global music publishing group peermusic. In view of this, the Commission needs to be flexible about what it defines as a monopoly, he said.

“I don’t want all the EU’s 23 music societies to spend €70 million each — not even €69 million — on new systems, and it’s good that they want to co-operate in ways to reduce the duplication of these efforts,” added Peer, who as a publisher said he wanted “cost effective and accurate systems”.

Peer advocated a re-definition of the term ‘collective management’. He explained: “My sense is that, traditionally, with the national copyright laws and the system of collective management that was build around [them], we have seen a combination of the very proper role of societies working for authors’ rights and enforcing them, and another role, which I would call a service level, that’s needed in terms of collecting and distributing. When we are talking about collective management today, these two roles might not have to go together and there might be separate expertise and leaderships that would be appropriate to those two functions.”

In addition, Peer said, there should be co-operation not only between societies operating in the same field but also those working in different fields, such as neighbouring rights. “There are greater efficiencies that could be achieved if we could merge these possibilities,” he added, also suggesting that content users might be prepared to “pay a little bit more” for access to content “if life was made easier for them”.

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Secure legal framework Streamlining the licensing process is more crucial than ever in today’s multiplatform digital world, asserted Peter Weber, the European Broadcasting Union’s Chairman of the Legal and Public Affairs Committee, and Vice Director of Legal Affairs at the German public broadcaster ZDF. With the advent of hybrid TV systems, which can access both broadcast and online content, “we can’t clear broadcasting rights separately from online rights when we are serving both at the same time”, Weber said. He pointed out that ZDF alone has to clear 70,000 contracts annually for the use of its archives. “We cannot clear that on our own, so we need collective management of rights and we welcome a regulation on collective management, because there should be a secure legal framework.

We think that a secure legal framework should not apply simply to music but that it should apply to all collective management of rights. Secondly, we think that there should be a technology-neutral tool kit.

What we are talking about is an extended collective-management licensing system by which collecting societies are allowed to represent so-called ‘outsiders’ for new technological developments.”

Weber said such a system would need to be “flexible enough to react quickly”, citing the extended licensing system available in the Nordic countries as a possible template for the scheme. “And to work, it also needs good governance,” he added.

As a content licensee, global search-engine giant Google is looking for a system that makes it simpler to authorise content on a cross-border basis, according to Sami Valkonen, Google’s Head of International Music Licensing for Android devices. “As a licensee, we are seeking the simplest and the most flexible licensing regime possible,” said Valkonen, who previously worked for Nokia’s Comes With Music platform. “And for that, [it is critical that] both collectives — I mean societies and publishers — limit the number of partners that we work with to a manageable number.”

Finding the balance Valkonen warned that “collective licensing does not mean blanket licensing”, with the latter effective for “standard usages” while the former is more suitable to new services. “When you are talking about experimental new services in the digital realm, you have to have a flexible marketplace of rights, where you can have a reasoned discussion with partners as to the fair and appropriate allocation of the revenue streams,” he said. “So in terms of the limits of collective licensing, I think it is important to find that balance [between] understanding the benefits of collective licensing, [while] also being wary of the potential market distortions that too much concentration and consolidation can induce.”

Valkonen picked up on what he had perceived during the Summit to be an antagonism between creativity and technology. For him, technology should be “an enabler of creativity,” he said.

“Technology can help in the distribution and dissemination of music and make it available to more people. And technology can certainly help in making sure that authors and rights holders get paid faster.”

Magdalena Vinent, President of IFRRO, the reproduction rights organisations for protecting images and text, and Director General of Spain’s CEDRO, explained that collective management operates in a different way than music or audiovisual for text and print.

“What we are really managing with our organisations is knowledge that is spread via educational outlets such as schools or universities,” she said. “Besides, the management of rights is primarily made by publishers for their authors. So what we are doing is to allow all these outlets to have access to knowledge but, at the same time, compensating rights holders — otherwise they would not be able to continue to create and to invest in new creations.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 17:30PM

Keynote Speech: Intellectual property, copyright and collective management - A European perspective Michel Barnier

Keynote speaker: Michel Barnier, Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, European Commission

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Barnier: ‘Authors’ rights are at the heart of the digital world’ European Commissioner Michel Barnier closed the 2011 World Copyright Summit by outlining his policies in the field of IP and copyright, writes Rémi Bouton.

In a heavily European-flavoured World Copyright Summit, it was fitting that European Commissioner Michel Barnier chose to close the event by showing his support for creators, whom he described as “the craftsmen of the spirit”, and for authors’ rights, which he said were “at the heart of the digital world in the making”.

As European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, Barnier oversees copyright issues. He started his speech, which was hotly anticipated by the Summit’s participants, by saying that creators “create richness, but not simply in economic terms. To speak clearly, what you [creators] are doing is not simply business. You exemplify a certain idea of our cultures and of the diversity of our societies — [you are] the soul of Europe.”

Before going into the details of his policies, Barnier reminded the audience that “authors’ rights are th revolutionary” and quoted the 19 century French author Victor Hugo, who wrote: “An author with [right to] ownership is a free author. If you withdraw his property right, you take away his independence.”

“Authors’ rights are not out of fashion,” Barnier continued. “They haven’t aged even a 100 years after the Bern Convention was adopted. On the contrary, they are at the heart of the digital world in the making.”

For Barnier, the time has come to stop “opposing [the] internet and creation”. He said: “Let’s stop limiting creation to ‘content that just needs to go through pipes’. And [the] internet is a fabulous tool that allows not only the dissemination of creative works, faster and to more citizens, but it is also at the origin of new forms of creation and therefore of value that will need to be protected.”

For Barnier, intellectual property is “at the heart of the growth of the European economy” and is part st of the European Union’s global strategy for the 21 century. “Protecting creative works and inventions in Europe stimulates innovation and therefore growth and employment in Europe,” said Barnier, whose mission in this context is to “facilitate licensing and ensure the respect of rights”.

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An enabling framework With this in mind, Barnier touched upon several projects related to copyright currently being undertaken by his department. The first is collective management, which he described as a system that has stood the test of time “over several centuries”.

Barnier suggested that, in order to operate within an open single market, collective management needs “an enabling framework” to help solve the problem of multi-territory licensing. “What is lacking at the moment is an enabling framework that will bring the necessary legal protection to rights societies, rights holders and users [and enable them] to agree on multi-territory licensing. We are missing a level playing field,” he said.

In response, Barnier is working on a single European framework that will make multi-territory licensing easier. “It will be a framework adapted to the digital era, and also to the expectations of consumers of creative works,” he said. He added that the new system would also facilitate the aggregation of repertoires.

“I will propose this framework, which must be seen as a support not a hindrance, at the beginning of 2012,” Barnier said, adding that he would also be proposing “common rules for transparency, governance and supervision”.

Barnier invited CISAC and its members to fully participate in the process of defining these new rules and procedures for collective societies operating in the single market. “I have confidence in the quality of our dialogue and I will need you to build upon and improve our proposition,” he said.

Fight the piracy plague Barnier’s second campaign concerns orphan works and is based on the principle that “the rights of authors will be protected as long as authors are known”.

On a third topic, audiovisual works, Barnier said he would be looking into the challenges and opportunities offered by the new digital services. He announced that his department is preparing a Green Paper for autumn 2011, which will serve as the basis for a larger consultation and the eventual drafting of legislation. “We want to ensure that all the new digital broadcasting opportunities are also opportunities for the creative sector,” he said.

Last but not least, Barnier announced plans to fight against piracy, which he described as “weakening the foundations of creation”. Noting that piracy “destroys 180,000 jobs in Europe”, he said: “We are going to set up a strategy or action plan against counterfeiting and piracy. We need to understand well the phenomenon before we can fight [it] properly.”

The first plank of this plan will focus on education and information, Barnier said, adding that he did not want to “criminalise” internet users. He explained: “The collaboration with internet service providers will be paramount. I want to strengthen the fight against this plague. It is not tolerable that creativity and our cultural heritage are ransacked for an unjustified profit, a windfall profit, benefiting some operators.”

In conclusion, Barnier urged creators and the market’s key players “to fully take advantage of the opportunities offered by the internet.”

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DAY 2 – June 8, 2011 – 17:50PM

Closing Speech: Connecting with creators and authors’ societies Robin Gibb

Keynote speaker: Robin Gibb, singer and songwriter / President of CISAC (UK)

Link to: [Video and article]

[Photos]

Gibb: ‘Individuals have a fundamental right to own the ideas they create’ CISAC President Robin Gibb spoke of his optimism about the future of copyright as he brought the third World Copyright Summit to a close, reports Adrian Crookes.

In his closing address to the World Copyright Summit in Brussels, CISAC President Robin Gibb said that, while he was frustrated by the pace of progress since delegates last met in Washington DC two years ago, he was nevertheless optimistic about the future.

“As a community, we have not done enough to ensure that, when creative works are used by third parties for commercial gain, those who created them and those who invested in their creation are rewarded,” said the British singer, songwriter and performer.

But Gibb said that his optimism had been boosted by the European Commission’s recently published ‘Strategy for Intellectual Property’ paper. He quoted from it: “The case does not need to be made any more: intellectual property rights in their different forms and shapes are key assets of the EU economy.”

The implication of this recognition, Gibb added, was that those who create these rights — “those who underpin the whole of the creative industries” — are also vital. It is the authors who are key assets, he said, “and [they] should be cherished and nurtured as such”.

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Increase efficiencies But the future of the creative industries and of creative individuals would only be secured, Gibb added, “if those who control, license and use our rights begin to take a longer term view. Scrabbling for individual short-term corporate commercial advantage will not build a sustainable model that ensures a healthy creative future.”

Looking ahead to the forthcoming draft EC Directive on Collective Rights Management, Gibb observed that it was a pity it had taken so long. But he added that he would rather have a document that had been properly thought through “than a knee jerk reaction”.

But Gibb recognised that the challenges would not be entirely solved by an EC directive, and that the authors’ societies would have to make significant changes too. “They [the EC] will lay some ground rules,” he said, “but societies and their members have to play their part. They must be willing to cooperate where they can to increase efficiency and share costs.”

Only by doing so, he added, could authors be assured of receiving what is properly due to them. And, in turn, “re-assert themselves as the natural home of rights management and licensing, both in Europe and throughout the world”.

Fighting for creators If you are passionate about something, Gibb said, you fight for it. He recounted a personal tale: “My brothers and I persisted because we believed in ourselves and we had a champion in [Bee Gees manager] Robert Stigwood, who believed that individuals had a fundamental right to own the ideas they created.”

The fight for creators’ rights would not be won overnight, Gibb cautioned — but he was hopeful that the tree, in time, would “not only bear fruit but [would] blossom and become an evergreen”.

With his considerable music-industry experience accrued over a 50-year career, Gibb came across as a fervent advocate of creator rights. He told the World Copyright Summit audience that he valued his role as creators’ representative and ultimate figurehead of the members of CISAC’s 229 authors’ societies in 121 countries.

“I’m proud to be President of CISAC,” Gibb concluded, “and I will keep on fighting for creators’ rights as long as I can draw breath.”

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See You in 2013!

All the photos, speeches and videos of the Copyright Summit are available on the CISAC & Summit’s website www.cisac.org www.copyrightsummit.com