By David Oxenford on Posted in Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsThe US Court of Appeals today released a decision upholding the Copyright Royalty Board’s 2015 decision setting the SoundExchange royalty rates for 2016-2020. We wrote about that decision here, and provided more details here. In any appeal of an agency decision, the Court routinely affords the agency deference in reaching its decision. The Court will… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsTwo years ago, a District Court Judge, in a case brought against a broadcaster alleging that the broadcaster owed money under California state law for playing pre-1972 sound recordings, dismissed the suit finding that the broadcaster was playing digitized versions of those songs, created after 1972, which were covered under Federal copyright law (we wrote… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsIn the last year, the popularity of Alexa, Google Home and similar “smart speaker” devices has led to discussions at almost every broadcast conference of how radio broadcasters should embrace the technology as the new way for listeners to access radio programming in their homes. Broadcasters are urged to adopt strategies to take advantage of the… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music Rights,On Line MediaThe week before last, we summarized the provisions of the Music Modernization Act as passed by the House of Representatives. The Senate is now poised to take up this legislation in a hearing scheduled by the Senate Judiciary Committee for next Tuesday, May 15. The legislation proposes, among other things, to set up a SoundExchange-like… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsThis week, the US House of Representatives passed the Music Modernization Act. While widely supported among many digital media companies providing on-demand subscription music services as well as by many in the music industry, the bill seemingly has not received the publicity that has been afforded to past music royalty legislation. That may be, in… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsLast week, the Copyright Royalty Board published a Federal Register Notice announcing that SoundExchange was auditing broadcaster Alpha Media as well as Music Choice and Google to assess their compliance with the statutory music licenses provided by Sections 112 and 114 of the Copyright Act for the public performance of sound recordings and ephemeral copies… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsThe amount paid to songwriters and publishing companies for the making of “phonorecords” will be going up after a Copyright Royalty Board decision just released to the parties to the case. A summary of the findings have been published on the CRB website, here. The new rules are available here. A full decision explaining the… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsYesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in a “Summary Order” that the Court said does “not have precedential effect,” upheld an even briefer decision of the US District Court Judge who oversees the BMI antitrust consent decree, determining that the Department of Justice was wrong in its interpretation of the consent… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Cable Carriage,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsThe Copyright Royalty Board issued a notice yesterday, here, that summarized its decision on the sound recording performance royalties for 2018-2022 to be paid by Satellite Radio and “Pre-existing Subscription Services” (“PSS”), essentially Music Choice for its music service usually packaged with cable television subscriptions. The terms associated with the new rates, embodied in the… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsIn a decision this week, the Florida Supreme Court rejected claims by Flo & Eddie (of the 1960s band the Turtles) that there was a common law public performance right in pre-1972 sound recordings in the state of Florida (the opinion is available here). The Florida court, after examining numerous avenues of argument, concluded that… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsThe alphabet soup of organizations that collect royalties for playing music has never been easy to keep straight, and today royalty issues sometimes seem even more daunting with new players like GMR (see our articles here, here and here) and arguments over issues like fractional licensing that only a music lawyer could love (see our… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsGlobal Music Rights, commonly known as GMR, is the newest Performing Rights Organization (PRO) in the US music business, licensing public performance rights to musical compositions of songwriters as diverse as various members of the Eagles to Pharrell Williams to George Gershwin. As we wrote here, in December, they offered a temporary license to the… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Broadcast Performance Royalty,Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music RightsThe CLASSICS (Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service and Important Contributions to Society) Act was introduced in Congress last week to try to clear up some of the ongoing disputes over the public performance rights of pre-1972 sound recordings. Through litigation, certain copyright holders (including, most notably, Flo and Eddie of the 1960’s band… Continue Reading
By David Oxenford on Posted in Intellectual Property,Internet Radio,Music Rights,On Line Media,Podcasting,Website IssuesI was recently interviewed by Steve Goldstein of Amplifi Media, a firm that consults for podcast companies, on the difficulties with the use of music in podcasts. That interview has been turned into an article on Steve’s blog, here, discussing these legal issues. That article discusses the same issues that we’ve written about here several… Continue Reading
