We have proposed a panel for SXSW in the Panel Picker with some great speakers I’ll be moderating.  “Getting to Beta Without Getting Beat Up” will emphasize the importance of licensing strategy milestones that overlay a music-tech startup’s product development strategy milestones.

A well-executed licensing strategy is every bit as much a part of the supply chain logistics as any other element of product development, if not more important.

A buggy product can usually be fixed.  Failure to execute a bespoke licensing strategy can subject the entire company to crippling and endless copyright infringement lawsuits.  In fact, if you are unlicensed or insufficiently licensed, one thing is a pretty sure bet:  The more successful you are, the more likely it is you’ll be sued–a proposition ripped from the headlines.

That scenario can waste the stockholders’ money, be defocusing in the extreme for management and severely damage relationships with the creative community–the life blood of any music startup.

On the other hand, “over clearing” while less costly than litigation still syphons off resources that for the most part lie fallow.

Our panel are all experienced hands in the licensing and metadata world and are themselves entrepreneurs:

• Keith Bernstein, Founder, Crunch Digital
• Rahul Rumalla, Chief Technology Officer & Head of Product, Paperchain
• Alan Graham, Co-Founder, Technical Architect, OCL

Please consider voting for our panel in the SXSW Panel Picker at this link, we’d really appreciate your support!

I’m looking forward to participating on a great panel on fixing our future in the music business, moderated by the brilliant Dr. Gigi Johnson, founder and executive director of the UCLA Center for Music Innovation.

Music 2020: Recreating Music’s Future will be a lunch time panel held on October 13 in Los Angeles under the auspices of the Association of Independent Music Publishers an important voice for independent publishers in our policy efforts.  I’m part of an august group: Sam Kling, SVP Creative Operations, SESAC & AIMP Board Member and Vickie Nauman, Founder & Owner, CrossBorderWorks, both of whom I know to be deep thinkers on problem solving in our business.

The event is to be held at Lawry’s, 100 North La Cienega Blvd. (near Wilshire) in Beverly Hills from 11:30 am to 1:45 pm on October 13.  Reservations are required and lunch is served.  Tickets are $44 for AIMP members and $57 for non-members.

Click here to get to the AIMP website to sign up!

I am honored to have been asked to participate in this symposium on moral rights co-sponsored by the U.S. Copyright Office and the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at the George Mason University School of Law.

Moral rights is a key area of the law of copyright that is sadly lacking in the United States and an important legal tool to protect the rights of artists.  You can find more about the symposium and register on the Copyright Office page.

Moral rights (or for the fancy people, droit moral) are largely statutory rights that maintain and protect the connection between an author and their work.  (As I highlighted in Artist Rights are Human Rights, moral rights are not economic rights like copyright, but transcend those rights.  This is why you see language in the human rights documents, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that essentially track the moral rights language.)

The two principal moral rights are the right of integrity and the right of attribution (which conversely includes protection from misattribution).  These are recognized in the Berne Convention (Article 6bis for those reading along).  Others that are not mentioned in Berne include the right of first publication (which the U.S. has a version of in the “first use” doctrine for songs under compulsory license) and withdrawal–which is a bit reminiscent of the more recent right to be forgotten.

When it comes to attribution, or what we might think of as credit, there is a form of imperfect social contract between record companies, film studios and television produces with the creative community.  This is largely thanks to years of collective bargaining with guilds such as the Writers Guild, SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild as anyone who has been to a Writers Guild credit arbitration can attest.  It is unlikely that any of these would trade on a creators name.

The place where we have problems, of course, is with the New Boss companies like YouTube, Google and Facebook.  These companies don’t just trade on your name, they SELL your name as an advertising keyword thus associating the artist’s name with products, works or services without the artist’s knowledge, albeit somewhat in the background.

Try boosting a post on Facebook and selecting the attributes of the audience you want to reach.  Type in the names of 5 popular artist and I feel certain that you will find them all there.

We also have confirmation of this business practice from the Luke Sample affidavit in a piracy case against Google where Google executives advised Sample how to maximize traffic through Google Adwords to push Sample’s pirate site:

If the U.S. expands its moral rights “patchwork”, it is likely that these business practices could come under a microscope as violations of moral rights.