WCS11: EC Promises Collective Management Solution – Too Early To Celebrate?

Kerstin Jorna is a brave woman. The deputy head of cabinet for Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s internal market and services commissioner, appeared on the World Copyright Summit’s session on Collective Management – Solution Provider for the Digital Economy.

She then proceeded to assure all interested parties that their needs will be considered for the European Union’s first ever legislation covering all aspects of intellectual property.

All well and good, apart from the fact that she was sharing the panel with formidable group of panellists: a creator (film composer David Arnold); a collecting society president (Sacem’s Bernard Miyet); a global music publisher (Ralph Peer); Sami Valkonen (Google’s head of music licensing for its Android products); president of a major European collective-management organisation (IFFRO’s Magdalena Vinent); and the legal and public affairs committee’s chairman at the European Broadcasting Union (Peter Weber).

Each one represented sections of the creative and related industries that needed their concerns considered for the legislation, which Jorna said is being developed over the next couple of years. She would be more than happy to listen to their views during the consultation period.

“It will allow for copyright and intellectual property in general, not just different types of rights, to being part of overall (EU) policy,”she said. “We need some ground rules to ensure mutual trust among collecting societies.”

Sacem’s Bernard Miyet declared, “We can’t wait”, as he explained why France’s Sacem had gone ahead and invested about €70 million in IT systems over eight years to ensure that it can deliver pan-European collecting services for its members. Crucially, he urged Europe’s collecting societies to find a way to collaborate and share the processing technologies to avoid duplication.

International publisher Ralph Peer could not resist the following quip: “I know we should take advantage of technology to create more efficient (collecting) systems. But I don’t want all the 23 societies in the EU to spend €71 million.”

The EBU’s Peter Weber urged the industry to aim to be copyright neutral, especially at a time when the emerging hybrid TV platforms will enable viewers to watch both live broadcast programmes and online catch-up TV on the same screen. “We can’t go round trying to create one set of rights for broadcast and different ones for online,” he said. This was all the more crucial as the EBU has to deal with 70,000 different contracts annually for programmes in its members’ archives.

As long as the EC comes up with the simplest solution for collecting royalties, Google, which is a licensee of content, will be cooperating with the EU new legislation, said Sami Valkonen, head of international music licensing for Android at Google.