Tag: Music Modernization Act

The DLC Nails it on Conditional Redesignation of the MLC

I’m certainly not a fan of really any of the companies that comprise the Digital Licensee Coordinator’s membership (DLC). In fact, you probably couldn’t find a more complete rogues’ gallery of most of my least favorite Big Tech companies—but when they’re right, they’re right.

Redesignation is the Copyright Office’s periodic check on whether the Mechanical Licensing Collective still meets the Music Modernization Act’s criteria to run the §115 blanket license. The Office can renew, or replace the designation to protect songwriters and licensees. In my view and the view of many others including the Digital Licensee Coordinator, The Office could also condition any renewal (or “redesignation”) of the MLC on improving its lackluster performance and postpone the renewal until the MLC improves, if ever. That’s just common sense.

The DLC’s most recent “ex parte” letter answers years of songwriter and publisher requests that the MLC has brushed aside—better matching, transparency, governance, timeliness, metrics, and accountability. Crucially, it confronts repeated, credible criticisms that the MLC’s investment of unmatched royalties is ultra vires (outside the law): the MMA authorizes collection and distribution, not portfoio-management schemes of a fund that is likely in excess of $1.2 billion of the songwriters’ money.

The Digital Licensee Coordinator urges the Copyright Office to conditionally redesignate the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) and pair that step with stronger oversight. This approach reflects common sense and Congressional intent: if redesignation weren’t meant to be used as leverage to correct course, Congress wouldn’t have created a periodic redesignation process at all—it would have handed the MLC lifetime appointments. They didn’t, as one would expect. The MLC isn’t the Harry Fox Agency after all. Conditional redesignation is therefore the appropriate tool to ensure the MLC performs its uniquely powerful statutory role responsibly, transparently, and in the interest of all rightsholders. 

The DLC stresses how the MLC’s powers—collecting and distributing over a billion dollars annually, enforcing the blanket license, and imposing costs on licensees—demand robust governance and accountability distinct from what’s expected of the DLC itself. With that asymmetry in mind, the Office should focus the redesignation decision on whether the MLC needs additional safeguards to fulfill Congress’s vision for §115. Debating whether those safeguards arrive as explicit conditions on redesignation or as stand-alone regulations is a matter of form, not substance; either pathway legitimately implements the MMA and squarely fits within the Office’s authority. 

To “tee up” the record, the DLC attaches a helpful and representative Exhibit cataloging songwriter, independent publisher, and creator-group critiques across six themes: unmatched “black box” royalties; data/matching problems; governance and conflicts; transparency and accountability gaps; operational and technical delays; and the investment of unclaimed royalties. That comment supports conditional redesignation backed by measurable performance metrics(e.g., black-box reduction targets, matching accuracy, timeliness, dispute resolution KPIs) or by new, targeted regulations—and, if needed, both. 

Finally, immediate triage should begin with abandoning the contested investment policy for unclaimed royalties—criticized by many stakeholders as ultra vires (which by the way, eliminates any indemnity protection in the MMA)—and liquidating the portfolio so cash flows to the people Congress intended to benefit: songwriters. Conditional redesignation gives the Office the oversight handle to make those corrections now, align incentives going forward, and ensure the MLC’s stewardship is limited to the scale of its statutory power. 

It also must be said that if the MLC doesn’t clean up its act, what comes next may not be so genteel. Conditional redesignation may look awfully good in the rear view mirror.

Digital-Licensing-Coordinator-to-USCO-2-Sept-22-2025Download

Fired for Cause:  @RepFitzgerald Asks for Conditional Redesignation of the MLC

U.S. Representative Scott Fitzgerald joined in the MLC review currently underway and sent a letter to Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on August 29 regarding operational and performance issues relating to the MLC.  The letter was in the context of the five year review for “redesignation” of The MLC, Inc. as the mechanical licensing collective.  (That may be confusing because of the choice of “The MLC” as the name of the operational entity that the government permits to run the mechanical licensing collective.  The main difference is that The MLC, Inc. is an entity that is “designated” or appointed to operationalize the statutory body.  The MLC, Inc. can be replaced.  The mechanical licensing collective (lower case) is the statutory body created by Title I of the Music Modernization Act) and it lasts as long as the MMA is not repealed or modified. Unlikely, but we live in hope.)

I would say that songwriters probably don’t have anything more important to do today in their business beyond reading and understanding Rep. Fitzgerald’s excellent letter.

Rep. Fitzgerald’s letter is important because he proposes that the MLC, Inc. be given a conditional redesignation, not an outright redesignation.  In a nutshell, that is because Rep. Fitzgerald raises many…let’s just say “issues”…that he would like to see fixed before committing to another five years for The MLC, Inc.  As a member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, Rep. Fitzgerald’s point of view on this subject must be given added gravitas.

In case you’re not following along at home, the Copyright Office is currently conducting an operational and performance review of The MLC, Inc. to determine if it is deserving of being given another five years to operate the mechanical licensing collective.  (See Periodic Review of the Mechanical Licensing Collective and the Digital Licensee Coordinator (Docket 2024-1), available at https://www.copyright.gov/rulemaking/mma-designations/2024/.)

The redesignation process may not be quickly resolved.  It is important to realize that the Copyright Office is not obligated to redesignate The MLC, Inc. by any particular deadline or at all.  It is easy to understand that any redesignation might be contingent on The MLC, Inc. fixing certain…issues…because the redesignation rulemaking is itself an operational and performance review.  It is also easy to understand that the Copyright Office might need to bring in some technical and operational assistance in order to diligence its statutory review obligations.  This could take a while.

Let’s consider the broad strokes of Rep. Fitzgerald’s letter.

Budget Transparency

Rep. Fitzgerald is concerned with a lack of candor and transparency in The MLC, Inc.’s annual report among other things. If you’ve read the MLC’s annual reports, you may agree with me that the reports are long on cheerleading and short on financial facts.  It’s like The MLC, Inc. thought they were answering the question “How can you tolerate your own awesomeness?”   That question is not on the list.  Rep. Fitzgerald says “Unfortunately, the current annual report lacks key data necessary to examine the MLC’s ability to execute these authorities and functions.”  He then goes on to make recommendations for greater transparency in future annual reports.

I agree with Rep. Fitzgerald that these are all important points.  I disagree with him slightly about the timing of this disclosure.  These important disclosures need not be prospective–they could be both prospective and retroactive. I see no reason at all why The MLC, Inc. cannot be required to revise all of its four annual reports filed to date (https://www.themlc.com/governance) in line with this expanded criteria.  I am just guessing, but the kind of detail that Rep. Fitzgerald is focused on are really just data that any business would accumulate or require in the normal course of prudently operating its business.  That suggests to me that there is no additional work required in bringing The MLC, Inc. into compliance; it’s just a matter of disclosure.

There is nothing proprietary about that disclosure and there is no reason to keep secrets about how you handle other people’s money.  It is important to recognize that The MLC, Inc. only handles other people’s money.  It has no revenue because all of the money under its management comes from either royalties that belong to copyright owners or operating capital paid by the services that use the blanket license.  It should not be overlooked that the services rely on the MLC and it has a duty to everyone to properly handle the funds. The MLC, Inc. also operates at the pleasure of the government, so it should not be heard to be too precious about information flow, particularly information related to its own operational performance. Those duties flow in many directions.

Board Neutrality

The board composition of the mechanical licensing collective (and therefore The MLC, Inc.) is set by Congress in Title I.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that the major publishers and their lobbyists who created Title I wrote themselves a winning hand directly into the statute itself.  (And FYI, there is gambling at Rick’s American Café, too.)  As Rep. Fitzgerald says:  

Of the 14 voting members, ten are comprised of music publishers and four are songwriters. Publishers were given a majority of seats in order to assist with the collective’s primary task of matching and distributing royalties. However, the MMA did not provide this allocation in order to convert the MLC into an extension of the music publishers.

I would argue with him about that, too, because I believe that’s exactly what the MMA was intended to do by those who drafted it who also dictated who controlled the pen.  This is a rotten system and it was obviously on its way to putrefaction before the ink was dry.

For context, Section 8 of the Clayton Act, one of our principal antitrust laws, prohibits interlocking boards on competitor corporations.  I’m not saying that The MLC, Inc. has a Section 8 problem–yet–but rather that interlocking boards is a disfavored arrangement by way of understanding Rep. Fitzgerald’s issue with The MLC, Inc.’s form of governance:

Per the MMA, the MLC is required to maintain an independent board of directors. However, what we’ve seen since establishing the collective is anything but independent. For example, in both 2023 and 2024, all ten publishers represented by the voting members on the MLC Board of Directors were also members of the NMPA’s board.  This not only raises questions about the MLC’s ability to act as a “fair” administrator of the blanket license but, more importantly, raises concerns that the MLC is using its expenditures to advance arguments indistinguishable from those of the music publishers-including, at times, arguments contrary to the positions of songwriters and the digital streamers.

Said another way, Rep. Fitzgerald is concerned that The MLC, Inc. is acting very much like HFA did when it was owned by the NMPA.  That would be HFA, the principal vendor of The MLC, Inc. (and that dividing line is blurry, too).

It is important to realize that the gravamen of Rep. Fitzgerald’s complaint (as I understand it) is not solely with the statute, it is with the decisions about how to interpret the statute taken by The MLC, Inc. and not so far countermanded by the Copyright Office in its oversight role.  That’s the best news I’ve had all day.  This conflict and competition issue is easily solved by voluntary action which could be taken immediately (with or without changing the board composition).  In fact, given the sensitivity that large or dominant corporations have about such things, I’m kind of surprised that they walked right into that one.  The devil may be in the details, but God is in the little things.

Investment Policy

Rep. Fitzgerald is also concerned about The MLC, Inc.’s “investment policy.”  Readers will recall that I have been questioning both the provenance and wisdom of The MLC, Inc. unilaterally deciding that it can invest the hundreds of millions in the black box in the open market.  I personally cannot find any authority for such a momentous action in the statute or any regulation.  Rep. Fitzgerald also raises questions about the “investment policy”:

Further, questions remain regarding the MLC’s investment policy by which it may invest royalty and assessment funds. The MLC’s Investment Policy Statement provides little insight into how those funds are invested, their market risk, the revenue generated from those investments, and the percentage of revenue (minus fees) transferred to the copyright owner upon distribution of royalties. I would urge the Copyright Office to require more transparency into these investments as a condition of redesignation.

It should be obvious that The MLC, Inc.’s “investment policy” has taken on a renewed seriousness and can no longer be dodged.

Black Box

It should go without saying that fair distribution of unmatched funds starts with paying the right people.  Not “connect to collect” or “play your part” or any other sloganeering.  Tracking them down. Like orphan works, The MLC, Inc. needs to take active measures to find the people to whom they owe money, not wait for the people who don’t know they are owed to find out that they haven’t been paid.  

Although there are some reasonable boundaries on a cost/benefit analysis of just how much to spend on tracking down people owed small sums, it is important to realize that the extraordinary benefits conferred on digital services by the Music Modernization Act, safe harbors and all, justifies higher expectations of those same services in finding the people they owe money.  The MLC, Inc. is uniquely different than its counterparts in other countries for this reason.

I tried to raise the need for increased vigilance at the MLC during a Copyright Office roundtable on the MMA. I was startled that the then-head of DiMA (since moved on) had the brass to condescend to me as if he had ever paid a royalty or rendered a royalty statement.  I was pointing out that the MLC was different than any other collecting society in the world because the licensees pay the operating costs and received significant legal benefits in return. Those legal benefits took away songwriters’ fundamental rights to protect their interests through enforcing justifiable infringement actions which is not true in other countries.

In countries where the operating cost of their collecting society is deducted from royalties, it is far more appropriate for that society to consider a more restrictive cost/benefit analysis when expending resources to track down the songwriters they owe. This is particularly true when no black box writer is granting nonmonetary consideration like a safe harbor whether they know it or not.

I got an earful from this person about how the services weren’t an open checkbook to track down people they owed money to (try that argument when failing to comply with Know Your Customer laws).  Grocers know more about ham sandwiches than digital services know about copyright owners. The general tone was that I should be grateful to Big Daddy and be more careful how I spend my lunch money. And yes I do resent this paternalistic response which I’m sorry to say was not challenged by the Copyright Office lawyer presiding who shortly thereafter went to work for Spotify.  Nobody ever asked for an open check.  I just asked that they make a greater effort than the effort that got Spotify sued a number of times resulting in over $50 million in settlements, a generous accommodation in my view. If anyone should be grateful, it is the services who should be grateful, not the songwriters.

And yet here we are again in the same place.  Except this time the services have a safe harbor against the entire world which I believe has value greater than the operating costs of the MLC.  I’d be perfectly happy to go back to the way it was before the services got everything they wanted and then some in Title I of the MMA, but I bet I won’t get any takers on that idea.

Instead, I have to congratulate Rep. Fitzgerald for truly excellent work product in his letter and for framing the issue exactly as it should be posed.  Failing to fix these major problems should result in no redesignation—fired for cause.

The Intention of Justice:  In Which The MLC Loses its Way on a Copyright Adventure

ARTHUR

Let’s get back to justice…what is justice?  What is the intention of justice?  The intention of justice is to see that the guilty people are proven guilty and that the innocent are freed.  Simple, isn’t it?  Only it’s not that simple.

From And Justice for All, screenplay written by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson

Something very important happened at the MLC on July 9:  The Copyright Office overruled the MLC on the position the MLC (and, in fairness, the NMPA) took on who was entitled to post-termination mechanical royalties under the statutory blanket license.  What’s important about the ruling is not just that the Copyright Office ruled that the MLC’s announced position was “incorrect”—it is that it corrected the MLC’s position that was in direct contravention of prior Copyright Office guidance.  (If this is all news to you, you can get up to speed with this helpful post about the episode on the Copyright Office website or read John Barker’s excellent comment in the rulemaking.)

“Guidance” is a kind way to put it, because the Copyright Office has statutory oversight for the MLC.  That means that on subjects yet to be well defined in a post-Loper world (the Supreme Court decision that reversed “Chevron deference”), I think it’s worth asking whether the Copyright Office is going to need to get more involved with the operations of the MLC.  Alternatively, Congress may have to amend Title I of the Music Modernization Act to fill in the blanks.  Either way, the Copyright Office’s termination ruling is yet another example of why I keep saying that the MLC is a quasi-governmental organization that is, in a way, neither fish nor fowl.  It is both a private organization and a government agency somewhat like the Tennessee Valley Authority.  Whatever it is ultimately ruled to be, it is not like the Harry Fox Agency which in my view has labored for decades under the misapprehension that its decisions carry the effect of law.  Shocking, I know.  But whether it’s the MLC or HFA, when they decide not to pay your money unless you sue them, it may as well be the law.

The MLC’s failure to follow the Copyright Office guidance is not a minor thing.  This obstreperousness has led to significant overpayments to pre-termination copyright owners (who may not even realize they were getting screwed).  This behavior by the MLC is what the British call “bolshy”, a wonderful word describing one who is uncooperative, recalcitrant, or truculent according to the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang.  The word is a pejorative adjective derived from Bolshevik.  “Bolshy” invokes lawlessness.

In a strange coincidence, the two most prominent public commenters supporting the MLC’s bolshy position on post-termination payments were the MLC itself and the NMPA, which holds a nonvoting board seat on the MLC’s board of directors.  This stick-togetherness is very reminiscent of what it was like dealing with HFA when the NMPA owned it.  It was hard to tell where one started and the other stopped just like it is now.  (I have often said that a nonvoting board seat is very much like a “board observer” appointed by investors in a startup to essentially spy on the company’s board of directors.  I question why the MLC even needs nonvoting board seats at all given the largely interlocking boards, aside from the obvious answer that the nonvoters have those seats because the lobbyists wrote themselves into Title I of the MMA—you know, the famous “spirit of the MMA”.)

Having said that, the height of bolshiness is captured in this quotation (89 FR 58586 (July 9, 2024)) from the Copyright Office ruling about public comments which the Office had requested (at 56588):

The only commenter to question the Office’s authority was NMPA, which offered various arguments for why the Office lacks authority to issue this [post-termination] rule. None are persuasive. [Ouch.]

NMPA first argued that the Office has no authority under section 702 of the Copyright Act or the MMA to promulgate rules that involve substantive questions of copyright law. This is clearly incorrect. [Double ouch.]

The Office ‘‘has statutory authority to issue regulations necessary to administer the Copyright Act’’ and ‘‘to interpret the Copyright Act.’’  As the [Copyright Office notice of proposed rulemaking] detailed, ‘‘[t]he Office’s authority to interpret [the Copyright Act]  in the context of statutory licenses in particular has long been recognized.’’

Well, no kidding.

What concerns me today is that wherever it originated, the net effect of the MLC’s clearly erroneous and misguided position on termination payments is like so many other “policies” of the MLC:  The gloomy result always seems to be they don’t pay the right person or don’t pay anyone at all in a self-created dispute that so far has proven virtually impossible to undo without action by the Copyright Office (which has other and perhaps better things to do, frankly).  The Copyright Office, publishers and songwriters then have to burn cycles correcting the mistake.  

In the case of the termination issue, the MLC managed to do both: They either paid the wrong person or they held the money.  That’s a pretty neat trick, a feat of financial gymnastics for which there should be an Olympic category.  Or at least a flavor of self-licking ice cream.

The reason the net effect is of concern is that this adventure in copyright has led to a massive screwup in payments illustrating what we call the legal maxim of fubar fugazi snafu.  And no one will be fired.  In fact, we don’t even know which person is responsible for taking the position in the first place.  Somebody did, somebody screwed up, and somebody should be held accountable.

Mr. Barker crystalized this issue in his comment on the Copyright Office termination rulemaking, which I call to your attention (emphasis added):

I do have a concern related to the current matter at hand, which translates to a long-term uneasiness which I believe is appropriate to bring up as part of these comments. That concern is, how did the MLC’s proposed policies [on statutory termination payments] come in to being in the first place? 

The Copyright Office makes clear in its statements in the Proposed Rules publication that “…the MLC adopted a dispute policy concerning termination that does not follow the Office’s rulemaking guidance.”, and that the policy “…decline(d) to heed the Office’s warning…”. Given that the Office observed that “[t]he accurate distribution of royalties under the blanket license to copyright owners is a core objective of the MLC”, it is a bit alarming that the MLC’s proposed policies got published in the first place. 

I am personally only able to come up with two reasons why this occurred. Either the MLC board did not fully understand the impact on termination owners and the future administration of those royalties, or the MLC board DID realize the importance, and were intentional with their guidelines, despite the Copyright Office’s warnings. 

Both conclusions are disturbing, and I believe need to be addressed.

Mr. Barker is more gentlemanly about it than I am, and I freely admit that I have no doubt failed the MLC in courtesy.  I do have a tendency to greet only my brothers, the gospel of Matthew notwithstanding.  Yet it irks me to no end that no one has been held accountable for this debacle and the tremendous productivity cost (and loss) of having to fix it.  Was the MLC’s failed quest to impose its will on society covered by the Administrative Assessment?  If so, why?  If not, who paid for it?  And we should call the episode by its name—it is a debacle, albeit a highly illustrative one. 

But we must address this issue soon and address it unambiguously.  The tendency of bureaucracy is always to grow and the tendency of non-profit organizations is always to seek power as a metric in the absence of for-profit revenue.  Often there are too many people in the organization who are involved in decision-making so that responsibility is too scattered.  

When something goes wrong as it inevitably does, no one ever gets blamed, no one ever gets fired, and it’s very hard to hold any one person accountable because everything is too diffused.  Instead of accepting that inevitable result and trying to narrow accountability down to one person so that an organization is manageable and functioning, the reflex response is often to throw more resources at the problem when more resources, aka money, is obviously not the solution.  The MLC already has more money than they know what to do with thanks to the cornucopia of cash from the Administrative Assessment.  That deep pocket has certainly not led to peace in the valley.

Someone needs to get their arms around this issue and introduce accountability into the process.  That is either the Copyright Office acting in its oversight role, the blanket license users acting in their paymaster role through the DLC, or a future litigant who just gets so fed up with the whole thing that they start suing everyone in sight.   

Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Theologica that a just war requires a just cause, a rightful intention and the authority of the sovereign (Summa, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 40).  So it is with litigation.  We have a tendency to dismiss litigation as wasteful or unnecessary with a jerk of the knee, yet that is overbroad and actually wrong.  In some cases the right of the people to sue to enforce their rights is productive, necessary, inevitable and—hopefully—in furtherance of a just cause like its historical antecedents in trial by combat.  

It is also entirely in keeping with our Constitution.  The just lawsuit allows the judiciary to right a wrong when other branches of government fail to act, or as James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, so the government by “…its several constituent parts may…be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”  

That’s a lesson the MLC, Inc. had to learn the hard way.  Let’s not do that again, shall we not?

Chronology: The Week in Review: Can an independent auditor look for overpayments?; @Helienne Explains the EU’s Cultural Protections Against Streaming Monopolists; @MikeHuppe Comment on AI Justice

The MLC announced it was auditing 49 users of the blanket mechanical license, a massive undertaking. This announcement sent me back to the audit provisions of Title I of the Music Modernization Act to review what the role of the auditor actually is for audits of music users by the MLC as opposed to audits of the MLC by copyright owners. As often happens when reviewing little-used code sections that abruptly become important, I was reminded of a couple nuances that were obviously flawed when drafted. The key nuance is how can a royalty examiner be looking for overpayments against the interest of the party that hired her but still be independent? 

How qualified is qualified?

The first issue is with the definition of a “qualified auditor”, a glitch that I’ve harped on a few times. The term “qualified auditor” comes up in two different contexts in the MMA–first, a qualified auditor who prepares the MLC’s audited financial statements. The definition of qualified auditor is in 17 USC § 115(e)(25) as “an independent, certified public accountant with experience performing music royalty audits.” The reason why this term is a drafting error is two fold–first, you don’t need a CPA to conduct music royalty audits and there is nothing on the CPA licensure exams that requires any knowledge of “music royalty audits.” Second, you do need a CPA to prepare audited financial statements if the books are maintained according to generally accepted accounting principles particularly if a financial audit requires an opinion as an attest service, but that role does not require knowledge of royalty audits. So the defined term has an internal contradiction. 

The Gaap, ruler of 25 legions of spirits from the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic grimoire

Not only is the definition hinky but it’s common knowledge (outside of the Imperial City, I guess) that many if not most royalty auditors are not CPAs. (There’s also a long-standing assumption among artist lawyers when this concept comes up in record or publishing deals that a CPA requirement for audits is intentionally punitive. The assumption is that CPAs charge more making the cost of auditing more burdensome (therefore less likely to happen), which remains to be proven but is pretty widely accepted.) So the definition should be limited to requiring a CPA for the MLC’s audited financial statements and the common alternate definition of “experienced royalty auditor” for the audit clauses. But let’s put that to one side. 

Overpayments and Independence

The MMA rule for auditing digital music providers states:

The qualified auditor shall determine the accuracy of royalty payments, including whether an underpayment or overpayment of royalties was made by the digital music provider to the mechanical licensing collective, except that, before providing a final audit report to the mechanical licensing collective, the qualified auditor shall provide a tentative draft of the report to the digital music provider and allow the digital music provider a reasonable opportunity to respond to the findings, including by clarifying issues and correcting factual errors.

Realize that the MLC and the services monitor payments and make frequent adjustments to royalties (which may be reflected on your royalty statement if you can find them). That’s different than an auditor who works for a client going and seeking out an overpayment as part of their audit report. Relieving the auditor of this conflict does not preclude the service from claiming an overpayment which is an ongoing part of invoicing (see, e.g., 37 CFR §210.27(d)(2)(ii)). You would not be creating a windfall for the party receiving the overpayment.

I would interpret the statute as not requiring the auditor to seek an additional overpayment not previously invoiced, but rather confirming the accuracy of any adjustments made for overpayments or underpayments already reflected on the statements that are the subject of the audit. That’s quite a different thing.

What makes an auditor independent is that they do not have a conflict of interest as to their client, in this case the MLC. The royalty auditor is intended to be an advocate for their client (who pays them) and they are hired to look for ways that the other side has failed to account to their client properly to their client’s disadvantage. Improper payments are most commonly underpayments, i.e., the music user has failed to pay all that the client is entitled to receive. Royalty statements are regularly recalculated for a host of reasons in the normal course of business without regard to the presence or absence of any audit. This is not to say that somehow the MLC (and eventually the copyright owners) get some kind of windfall because the services missed something if any auditor is not seeking out an overpayment. That’s particularly true since there will likely be multiple sets of eyes on the field work and draft audit report. And trust me, they will all be trying to find somebody else’s mistake.

Or said another way, copyright owners don’t receive a windfall that was somehow missed by the largest corporations in commercial history who can determine what floor of which building you are on at what time of day at what address, e.g., sporting goods or children’s toys, so they can serve ads to your phone. Are we really worried about these little lambs getting lost in the woods?

@Helienne Explains the EU’s Cultural Protections Against Streaming Monopolists

We were lucky to get an interview with ESCA President Helienne Lindvall about the European Parliament’s report on cultural protections against streaming monopolies. This is a very important development and something we could use in the United States where this focus is sadly lacking.

@MikeHuppe Made an Important Comment on AI Justice for Creators

SoundExchange CEO Mike Huppe’s comment on AI justice is welcome from a rights platform.

Guest Post: The Music Modernization Act is Stifling Innovation in the Music Industry

[The chickens are coming home to roost.  As I warned before the Music Modernization Act was passed, Title I has big problems.  Remember that Title I established the Mechanical Licensing Collective (publishers and songwriters) and the Digital Licensee Coordinator (digital music platforms). It was sold to songwriters on the basis that “the services pay for everything”.  We will see how true that ends up being (as the copyright owners have to pay their costs to populate or correct the HFA database which is a massive undertaking).  Nobody talked to any DMP startups when the legislation was drafted or when the “administrative assessment” was litigated before the Copyright Royalty Judges.  But now startups are getting the bill and they’re not too happy, particularly 115 services that never had to pay for a license other than royalties.  I addressed some of this in a 2018 post on MusicTech Solutions that was reposted on Newsmax Finance.]

From: Max Fergus
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 11:06 AM
Subject:
To: LUM Team

A Letter to the Music Industry,  

Beware, the future of music is in jeopardy.

The Music Licensing Collective (“MLC”) recently announced that it will begin to regulate the largest major music streaming platforms in 2021. However, this agency, formed behind closed doors between the major labels and streaming services themselves, will only hurt those of us who are actively fighting the unjust practices of the platforms that are being regulated in the first place.

The Music Modernization Act is a “competition killer” set out to destroy the platforms that are trying to create a new tomorrow for independent musicians and stifling current and future innovation within the industry.

We are not alone and it’s time to fight. 
Please find our LinkedIn Article here as well as a link to our post
Please share and repost if possible in our fight against the MMA.

___________________________________________
Article Preview
We were told when we started our company that the institutions within the music industry were always going to be against us. In fact, many people told us these institutions would do everything in their power to curb innovation to make sure the money stayed where it always has – in the pockets of the major labels and the major music streaming services.

Finally, after 10 years of archaic practices in the music streaming industry, which widened the financial gap between the one percent of the music industry stakeholders and the rest of the starving artists, the Music Modernization Act (“MMA”) was created. At its most basic level, the goal was to take the onus off of major streaming platforms to track and remit royalties generated from these major platforms into the pockets of the right artists/labels in a more timely fashion through a new government-subsidized organization known as the Mechanical Licensing Collective (“MLC”).

Sounds great, right? Wrong. This will set back the music industry for years to come.

Imagine starting a process to MODERNIZE MUSIC and how music is monetized for all artists, yet the only stakeholders the MLC brought in to discuss how the MMA and the MLC would operate are the major streaming platforms and major labels themselves. So, what did they do? They structured the MLC in a way that will save these major corporations millions of dollars while completely neglecting the reason why the law was written in the first place – to oversee the music streaming platforms that have consistently, purposefully and negligently not paid the creators – whose content drives their service – their fair share in a transparent and efficient way.

The MMA was designed to regulate and modernize the practices of “royalty-bearing” music streaming services like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Next year, the MLC will open its doors and, as part of its first year of operations, it requires the companies included within the MLC to help pay for “start-up fees.” Companies outside of the largest music streaming companies, such as smaller DSPs and smaller royalty-bearing music streaming platforms, must also share unproportionally in these expenses. Essentially, the MLC and the largest streaming platforms want smaller services to pay more than their fair share for the MLC to oversee and audit the largest players in the music streaming industry…even those services who operate to fix the same problems as the new entity itself.

It gets worse.

Is the MLC Putting Smaller Streaming Platforms Out of Business?

LÜM was created to serve a similar foundational mission to these entities – to help guide an industry that needs to better support its creators through innovation. Because of that, we made a choice to not be a part of the traditional recorded music industry. We pay NO royalties and instead have proven that there is a better future. Instead of royalties, LÜM created the first virtual gifting system in a music discovery platform that allows fans to help directly support their favorite independent artists. The result?

Artists on LÜM earn an average of ~6x more per stream than every single other music streaming platform in the U.S.

Just like so many other companies that are trying to advance the music industry, LÜM is now facing an uphill battle against an organization (MLC) that was developed in conjunction with the same stakeholders who put the music industry in this position in the first place. The fees LÜM and other innovative companies are facing, to help fund the MLC, are substantial. Every new innovative company will face them and will provide a financial hurdle that will leave the majority of current and future innovative music startups dead in the water. No new entrants and no new competition mean the industry will stay exactly where it has for the last 15 years – putting money in the pockets of the rich and neglecting those that are trying to change the industry for the better.

We cannot let this happen. Innovation must continue or we face a scary reality for the music industry and the majority of artists and innovators that have been neglected by it.

— 
Max Fergus | Chief Executive Officer

Check out my favorite song on LÜM Here!

Defiance or Collaboration? The Role of the Presidential Signing Statement in MLC Board Appointments

Even though they have a long history, Presidential Signing Statements are not exactly front and center in every civics class or constitutional public law class in America.  You may be hearing about them for the first time now.  But that doesn’t mean they have not been an important part of Constitutional law-making and jurisprudence.

Presidential Signing Statements were first used by President James Monroe in 1822 in the form of a “special message” to the Senate. Presidents Andrew Jackson, John Tyler and Ulysses Grant also issued signing statements, but they were used infrequently until the 20th Century.  Then their use picked up quite a bit starting with President Theodore Roosevelt and continuing to the present day.  So the use of Signing Statements is quite bipartisan.  While Signing Statements may not themselves have any actionable legal effect, they should not be ignored, either.

The MMA Presidential Signing Statement

Not surprisingly, there is a Presidential Signing Statement accompanying the Music Modernization Act (“MMA”) specifically relating to Title I and at that specifically relating to the MLC board appointments.  The relevant language is:

One provision, section 102, authorizes the board of directors of the designated mechanical licensing collective to adopt bylaws for the selection of new directors subsequent to the initial designation of the collective and its directors by the Register of Copyrights and with the approval of the Librarian of Congress (Librarian). Because the directors are inferior officers under the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, the Librarian must approve each subsequent selection of a new director. I expect that the Register of Copyrights will work with the collective, once it has been designated, to ensure that the Librarian retains the ultimate authority, as required by the Constitution, to appoint and remove all directors.

Let’s explore why we should care about this guidance.

According to Digital Music News, there have been changes at the Mechanical Licensing Collective, Inc. (“MLCI”) the private non-profit permitted under Title I of the MMA:

[I]t appears that two separate MLC board members are jumping ship.  The details are just emerging and remain unconfirmed, though it appears that two members — one representing indie songwriters and the other on the publishing side — are out of the organization.

Because the board composition of MLCI is preemptively set by the U.S. Copyright Act along with many other aspects of MLCI’s operating mandate, the question of replacing board members may be arising sooner than anyone expected.  As MLCI is a creature of statute, it should not be controversial that law-makers play an ongoing role in its governance.

The Copyright Office Weighs In

The Copyright Office addressed board appointments for MLCI in its first request for information for the designation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective (83 CFR 65747, 65750 (December 21, 2018) available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2018-12-21/pdf/2018-27743.pdf):

The MLC board is authorized to adopt bylaws for the selection of new directors subsequent to the initial designation of the MLC. The Presidential Signing Statement accompanying enactment of the MMA states that directors of the MLC are inferior officers under the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, and that the Librarian of Congress must approve each subsequent selection of a new director. It also suggests that the Register work with the MLC, once designated, to address issues related to board succession.

When you consider that MLCI is, for all practical purposes, a kind of hybrid quasi-governmental organization (or what the Brits might call a “quango”), the stated position of the President, the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office should not be surprising. 

Why the Controversy?

As the Songwriters Guild of America notes in comments to the Copyright Office in part relating to the Presidential Signing Statement (my emphasis):

Further, it seems of particular importance that the Executive Branch also regards the careful, post-designation oversight of the Mechanical Collective board and committee members by the Librarian of Congress and the Register as a crucial prerequisite to ensuring that conflicts of interest and bias among such members not poison the ability of the Collective to fulfill its statutory obligations for fairness, transparency and accountability. 

The Presidential Signing Statement, in fact, asserts unequivocally that “I expect that the Register of Copyrights will work with the collective, once it has been designated, to ensure that the Librarian retains the ultimate authority, as required by the Constitution, to appoint and remove all directors.”

SGA regards it as a significant red flag that the NMPA-MLC submission to the Copyright Office devotes the equivalent of ten full pages of text principally in attempting to refute this governmental oversight authority, and regards the expression of such a position by NMPA/MLC as arguably indicative of an organization more inclined towards opaque, insider management control than one devoted to fairness, transparency and accountability.

So the Presidential Signing Statement to the MMA is obviously of great import given the amount of ink that has been spilled on the subject.  Let’s spill some more.

How might this oversight be given effect and will it be in the public record or an informal process behind closed doors?  Presumably it should be done in the normal course by a cooperative and voluntary collaboration between the MLC and ultimately the Librarian.  Minutes of such collaboration could easily be placed in the Federal Register or some other public record on the Copyright Office website.  Failing that collaboration, it could be done by either the Department of Justice (unlikely) or by individuals (more likely) asking an Article III court to rule on the issue.  

Of course, the issue should not delay the Copyright Royalty Judges from proceeding with their assessment determination to fund the MLC pursuant to the controversial voluntary settlement or otherwise.  One could imagine an oversight role for the CRJs given that Congress charged them with watching the purse strings and the quantitative implies the qualitative.  The CRJs have until until July 2020 to rule on the initial administrative assessment and appeal seems less likely today given the voluntary settlement and the elimination of any potential objectors. 

Since the Title I proponents drafted the bill to require a certain number of board seats to be filled by certain categories of persons approved by Congress in a Madisonian balance of power, the Presidential Signing Statement seems well grounded and furthers the Congressional mandate.

Yet there is this conflict over the Presidential Signing Statement.  What are the implications?

A Page of History is Worth A Volume of Logic

The President’s relationship to legislation is binary—sign it or veto it.  Presidential Signing Statements are historically used as an alternative to the exercise of the President’s veto power and there’s the rub. 

Signing Statements effectively give the President the last word on legislation as the President signs a bill into law.   Two competing policies are at work in Presidential Signing Statements—the veto power (set forth in the presentment clause, Article I, Sec. 7, clause 2), and the separation of powers. 

Unlike some governors, the President does not enjoy the “line item veto” which permits an executive to blue pencil the bits she doesn’t like in legislation presented for signature.  (But they tried–Line Item Veto Act ruled unconstitutional violation of presentment clause in Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998).) The President can’t rewrite the laws passed by Congress, but must veto the bill altogether.  Attempting to both reject a provision of a new law as unconstitutional, announce the President’s intention not to enforce that provision AND sign the bill without vetoing it is where presidents typically run into trouble.

Broadly speaking, Presidential Signing Statements can either be a President’s controversial objection to a bill or prospective interpretive guidance.  Signing Statements that create controversy are usually a refusal by the President to enforce the law the President just signed because the President doesn’t like it but doesn’t want to veto it.  Or to declare that the President thinks the law is unconstitutional and will not enforce it for that reason—but signed it anyway.  

The President can also use the Signing Statement to define or interpret a key term in legislation in a particular way that benefits the President’s policy goals or political allies.  President Truman, for example, interpreted a statutory definition in a way that benefited organized labor which was later enforced by courts in line with the Signing Statement.  President Carter used funds for the benefit of Vietnam resisters in defiance of Congress, but courts later upheld the practice—in cases defended by the Carter Justice Department.  The practice of using Presidential Signing Statements is now routine and has been criticized to no avail for every administration in the 21st Century including Bush II, Obama and now Trump. 

Since the 1980s, it has become common for Presidents to issue dozens if not hundreds of Presidential Signing Statements during their Administration.  So it should come as no surprise if the Department of Justice drafted up the statement for the MMA prior to it being presented to the President to be signed into law.  (See the American Presidency Project archives https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/presidential-documents-archive-guidebook/presidential-signing-statements-hoover-1929-obama)

Defiance or Collaboration?

What does this mean for the MMA?  The President certainly did not call out the statutorily required board membership of the MLC as an unconstitutional overreach that he would not enforce.  To the contrary, the MMA Signing Statement expresses the President’s desire that the legislation comply with the requirements of the Constitution.  

Moreover,  the MMA Presidential Signing Statement is not a declaration about what the President will or won’t enforce but rather interprets a particular section of a long and winding piece of legislation.  (Title I principally amended Section 115 of the Copyright Act—now longer than the entire 1909 Copyright Act.)  This kind of interpretation seems to be consistent with the practices of prior Presidents of both parties, not an end-run around either the veto power or separation of powers.

Failing to acknowledge the admonition of the signing statement would seem an unnecessary collision both with long-standing jurisprudence and with a sensible recommendation from the President of how the Librarian, the Copyright Office and the Justice Department expect to approach the issue in collaboration with the MLCI.  That’s possibly why the Copyright Office restated the Signing Statement in the RFP.

Title I of the MMA is a highly technical amendment to a highly technical statute.  A little interpretive guidance is probably a good thing.  Collaboration certainly makes more sense than defiance.

Should the Copyright Office’s Best Practices Shine Sunlight on the Unmatched?

[This post first appeared in the MusicTechPolicy Monthly newsletter.  Become an email follower of this blog to get your copy.]

We’ve all heard that the digital music services are sitting on a pile of cash in unmatched statutory mechanical royalties also known as the “black box”.  No one knows how much because Title I of the Music Modernization Act does not require them to disclose the unmatched sums being held as of the enactment date (October 11, 2018–a year ago), much less a bring down of the current amount.  And unsurprisingly, no service has voluntarily disclosed how much they are holding.

One may ask, why can’t you just look up on the financial statements of at least the public companies how much they are accruing for their share of the black box?  Good luck with that.

The monies owed to the unmatched “known unknowns” is probably the number one question the services don’t ask their third party reporting agents.  And because of the well known agency principle that “notice of a fact that an agent knows or has reason to know is imputed to the principal if knowledge of the fact is material to the agent’s duties to the principal,” these services likely know as a matter of law how much is in their principals’ respective black boxes or at least what they couldn’t match.  (Restatement (Third) of Agency Sec. 5.03.)

Fortunately, the Copyright Office is tasked with establishing best practices for distributing these unmatched black box monies through regulations to implement these and other provisions of the Music Modernization Act, such as the late fee for non-compliant services.

The Copyright Office has also announced the “kick off” of its study of unclaimed royalties study to be held in Washington, DC on December 6.  This will be great for Washington area songwriters, as well as convenient for the lobbyists and lawyers, but everyone else will have to wait for the transcript and video which unfortunately (and perhaps incredibly) will not be live streamed.  Even so, these pending regulations and the upcoming mandated study on matching are the best chance songwriters have had for a generation to get a straight count on unmatched mechanicals.

There are two currently existing standards that the Copyright Office can reference for examples of industry best practices-the SoundExchange unclaimed royalty search for new members and the Lowery-Ferrick Spotify class action Songclaims portal powered by Crunch Digital.  It seems inescapable that these claiming standards should be guideposts for both the Copyright Office and the Copyright Royalty Judges.

Having such clear cut standards–already operational so not theoretical–is fortunate because it seems obvious that the Congress is both concerned with the black box distributions not being gamed and also intends to exercise its statutory authority to retain oversight over the Mechanical Licensing Collective’s operations.  In fact, Senator Grassley specifically stated in his questions for the record following the Copyright Office oversight hearing that:

The success of the Music Modernization Act (MMA) will depend, to a large extent, on the effective and efficient operation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). The MMA included provisions to ensure that there was robust ongoing oversight of the MLC by both the Copyright Office and Congress, and that the new MLC would be accountable to the stakeholders.”

This is in addition to the oversight role of the Copyright Royalty Judges with respect to the Administrative Assessment and at least budgetary aspects of the MLC’s operations that inevitably will turn the quantitative into the qualitative.

During her July 30 testimony at the Copyright Office oversight hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Register of Copyrights Karyn Temple was peppered with questions about the black box from Members of the Committee, including Representatives Ted Deutch, Sheila Jackson-Lee and Chairman Jerry Nadler.

These months after the hearing, the gravamen of the Committee’s questions were crystalized in yet another copyright infringement suit brought against Spotify, this time by Eminem’s publishers.  The key theory of the suit is that Spotify is out of compliance with the conditions for the new safe harbor for copyright infringers that is one of the central themes of the MMA.  The Copyright Office can use the complaint as another guidepost for best practices to be compassed by their new regulations.

As drafted, Title I is an invitation for litigation, so it should be no surprise that the independent publishing community stepped forward to sue as that was the only way to find out what was going on behind the curtain.  However, as Senator Grassley emphasized, Congress charged the Copyright Office to establish regulations to implement Title I and gave the Copyright Royalty Judges a defacto oversight role through their approval of the MLC’s budget.

  1. Copyright Office Regulations

The Copyright Office is in the process of drafting regulations for a number of areas in Title I.  The Copyright Office therefore is in a unique position to avoid a maelstrom of litigation by adopting regulations that shine light on the unmatched, recognize industry practices by SoundExchange and Crunch Digital, and accomplish simple goals.  This is not hard.

Regulations should require iterative public disclosure to accompany the iterative matching  required by Title I.  Remember-many of these services are the biggest, smartest and richest companies in the history of commerce.  They know something about these systems as they all have to one degree or another developed significant in-house expertise.

However, it is crucial to have the unmatched actually administered by an unrelated and trusted infomediary.  This could be done by repurposing existing searchable databases for unclaimed funds while simultaneously disclosing to the public the amounts owed for each song.

Balance the Checkbook:  Immediate Public Release of Trial Balance and Monthly Updates of Unmatched

Each service currently participating in the Initial Administrative Assessment proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Judges should disclose an aggregate trial balance of the total sums they are holding in their respective unmatched accounts.  This total number should be made public as well as the methodology used to calculate it.  Nothing should or needs to be redacted.

The services should update that initial disclosure on a monthly basis.  The monthly calculation should show the month’s starting balance of unmatched royalties, how much was paid out during the month, how much was added during the month, and the remaining balance at the end of the month.  This simple calculation would allow songwriters to know what monies were being held with no intermediaries.  It’s as simple as balancing a checkbook.

Unmatched Lookup

If the services know the total sums, they should also be able to disclose the sound recording titles at least, if not the artist names, ISRCs, other metadata for the recordings of the songs that comprise the totals.  These services should be able to provide a simple web-based look-up so that songwriters could know if their songs are included in a service’s unmatched accrual.

Cost Reimbursement

It is becoming increasingly obvious to independent publishers that there will be significant resources and costs required to deliver their data to the MLC and claim their unmatched.   Those transaction costs of delivering data to the MLC-without which the imagined global rights database would not be functional enough to distribute the black box effectively-are incremental to publishers who have been doing business prior to the MMA and the MLC.

These incremental costs are easily identifiable and should be invoiced to the MLC by rights owners to be included in the next administrative assessment and reimbursed by the services.

Future Licensees

Any future licensee (blanket or nonblanket) should also be required to comply with these obligations and disclosures.

2.  Role of the Copyright Royalty Judges

The Copyright Royalty Judges are currently conducting a proceeding to establish the initial “administrative assessment” for the MLC.  The rules of the proceeding require the MLC and the Digital Licensee Coordinator to attempt to reach a voluntary agreement on the amount of the assessment.  If they fail, the CRJs will determine it for them.  The voluntary negotiation is divided into two periods: July 8 to September 6, and then September 7 to January 28.

The parties have failed to reach an agreement in the first period already, so a very basic assessment of probabilities means there’s less than a 50% chance they will agree during the second period.  If they fail to reach an agreement by February 17th, the CRJs will commence a hearing to reach the decision for them.  (One could argue that the likelihood of a voluntary agreement increases with the passing of time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at this point-it seems to be going the opposite direction.)

Remember-the MLC is supposed to have their imagined global rights database up and running and be fully operational and able to render statements shortly after January 1, 2021, or a little over 14 months from now.  At this point, it seems that there is a greater than 50% probability that Congress will have to amend the MMA to extend the deadline.  Presumably something has happened in the last year to advance the ball.

Crucially, there is an inextricable link between the amount of the administrative assessment and what the MLC intends to do with the money.  Two of those functions will be (1) the MLC’s own efforts at matching whatever is unmatched when the Digital Licensee Coordinator delivers the unmatched accounts (and presumably transaction logs) from the services to the MLC after January 1, 2021, and (2) ingesting data for the imagined global rights database.

Unmatched Best Practices and Disclosures

The CRJs should take a very close look at both the startup and the operating budget for the MLC as well as the underlying assumptions, processes and vendors for those functions to take on the U.S. accounting burden for the entire world.  It should be obvious that the services have a great deal of experience in licensing copyrights and operating royalty systems.

The CRJs should also consider whether they have the authority to address the nexus between the best practices to be adopted by those seeking to rely on the retroactive safe harbor, payments of the newly matched prior to 1/1/21 and public reporting of both accrued unmatched royalties and claiming before and after 1/1/21.  I think they do and they probably have an obligation to do so that is at least as great as the obligation on the Copyright Office.<

Sufficiency of Funding and Sufficiency of Allocation

As Senator Grassley has asked, the CRJs need to address what happens if the process fails to hit the deadlines as part of their determination of the administrative assessment.  Each passing day makes it more likely that the entire procedure will grind to a halt before statements can be rendered.

This concerns both the DLC funding the MLC sufficiently, but it also depends on the MLC allocating those sums appropriately across its operations–and the quantitative implies the qualitative.  Moreover, the CRJs need to fashion a procedure for relief that can be taken up inexpensively by any copyright owner that has a good faith belief they have simply not been accounted to. An example would be someone who was being paid under a statutory license (NOI or modified compulsory) prior to January 1, 2021 whose statements then drop to zero thereafter or who simply receive no statements at all.

While the Register said in response to Rep. Deutch during the Copyright Office oversight hearing that both MLC and AMLC had agreed with the Copyright Office interpretation that unclaimed funds are not to be distributed before 2023, the MLC’s actual statement on the issue is more nuanced.  The judges need to take this into account and leave nothing to the imagination in their determination.

3.  Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant

As Mr. Justice Brandeis taught us in Other People’s Money-And How Bankers Use It,“sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Songwriters are in need of both.

Postdicting the Future: Five Things Congress Could Do for Music Creators That Wouldn’t Cost the Taxpayer a Dime from The Hill

[This is a July 30, 2013 summary from The Hill of my series that first appeared in the Huffington Post on July 26, 2013–let’s see how I did after the Music Modernization Act.]

1.  Create an Audit Right for Songwriters for Compulsory Licenses:  One of the oldest compulsory licenses in the Copyright Act is the “mechanical license”, the statutory mandate forcing songwriters to license songs that dates from 1909.  The government mandates the license and also mandates the rate that songwriters are paid—from 1909 until 1977 that rate was set at 2¢ per recording.  Although that rate was eventually indexed to inflation leading to the current 9.1¢ minimum, songwriters had to dig out of a deep hole.

Getting paid is another story.  This statutory license requires songwriters be sent “statements of account” for royalties—but songwriters are not allowed to conduct a “royalty compliance” examination (called an “audit”).  The law requires a company officer and a CPA to certify the company’s statements—a practice rarely complied with.  As recently demonstrated by Aimee Mann’s lawsuit against Medianet, if songwriters don’t get paid there’s not much they can do except sue—a costly process.

The government tells the songwriter “trust—but don’t verify.”  This is an easy fix.  Congress could give songwriters an audit right as they did for stakeholders in the contemporary digital performance compulsory license for satellite radio and Internet radio.

2.  Allow Artists and Songwriters to Opt Out of the Compulsory License:  The recent blow-up regarding the so-called “Internet Radio Fairness Act” and the related ASCAP and BMI rate court proceedings should let the Congress know that there are many artists and songwriters who want to be able to decide who gets to license their songs.  Again, the digital performance compulsory license allows copyright owners to control “interactive” uses of their works—why not at least do the same for the mechanical license as well?

3. Require Digital Royalties for pre-72 Sound Recordings:  Sound recordings did not receive federal copyright protection until 1972.  When the Congress established the digital performance royalty, it seemed to clearly apply to all recordings and did not arbitrarily exclude recordings prior to 1972.  However, this “gotcha” is used by SiriusXM and others to avoid paying great American artists whose records were released before 1972—jazz, R&B and rock legends get nothing.  Congress could fix this “gotcha” and secure a fair share of digital performance royalties to these authors of our musical heritage.

4.  Require All Unpaid Statutory Mechanical Royalties Be Paid to the State Unclaimed Property Offices:  As Aimee Mann’s alleged in her lawsuit against the white label provider Medianet, witnesses stated that 23 percent of the songs used by Medianet are unlicensed—which could easily be millions of songs if true.  And there are likely a number of digital music services that are arbitrarily holding unpaid royalties in an unauthorized “escrow.”

It seems that there could be substantial royalties controlled by the very retailers who must pay songwriters under the law, a potentially significant moral hazard.  Congress could require that any “escrowed” royalties be paid over under State unclaimed property laws—a lawful “escrow.”

5.  Require that Online and Offline Videos Follow the Same Rules:  As online video platforms become available through Internet enabled home televisions, attention should be paid to a frequently overlooked category of songwriter—the film and television music composers.  Current reporting by online video platforms makes it difficult for score composers to be paid for their work.  The Congress may well ask whether those who seek to replace television should be held to the same licensing standards as television.

These are but a few ideas the Congress could be addressing that might make a difference in the lives of artists and songwriters and would cost the taxpayer very little.  All leverage existing structures and bureaucracies, eliminate “gotchas,” and help to reduce the unintended consequences of government mandated compulsory licensing.

What Does the New MLC Candidate Mean for the Copyright Office?

Nate Rau reports in The Tennessean that there is a new group competing to be the “Mechanical Licensing Collective” under the Music Modernization Act.  I would expect there will be at least one more group come forward in the coming weeks.  This competition was easy to expect, but it does call to account the short time frames for setting up the MLC in the Music Modernization Act.  Those time frames fail to take into account the potential delaying effects of competition.

Multiple competitors also suggests that whoever wins the designation of the Copyright Office should be looking over their shoulder before the 5 year review of the MLC’s performance by the Copyright Office.  It’s likely that whoever is the runner-up in that designation pageant will still be around and may be critical of the winner when that 5 year review comes around.

It’s also worth noting that no one seems to be very interested in the music services’ counterpart to the MLC, being the “Digital Licensee Coordinator” or the “DLC”.  Whoever ends up getting to be the DLC is also going to be subject to a 5 year review, likely to be side by side with the MLC’s review.

As it now seems like there may be hard feelings on the part of the runner up for the MLC, this would be a good time for the Copyright Office to come up with objective criteria for both the selection of a winner and the definition of success when the 5 year review comes up.  It appears from the statutory language that Congress intends for the Copyright Office to come up with these criteria, and the clearer and more transparent the criteria, the less likely it will be for hard feelings to result in a meltdown.

The review of both the MLC and the DLC are governed by the same language in the Music Modernization Act:

Following the initial designation of the [mechanical licensing collective/digital licensee coordinator], the Register shall, every 5 years, beginning with the fifth full calendar year to commence after the initial designation, publish notice in the Federal Register in the month of January soliciting information concerning whether the existing designation should be continued, or a different entity meeting the criteria described in clauses (i) through (iii) of subparagraph (A) shall be designated. Following publication of such notice, the Register shall—

“(I) after reviewing the information submitted and conducting additional proceedings as appropriate, publish notice in the Federal Register of a continuing designation or new designation of the [mechanical licensing collective/digital licensee coordinator], as the case may be, and the reasons for such a designation, with any new designation to be effective as of the first day of a month that is not less than 6 months and not longer than 9 months after the date on which the Register publishes the notice, as specified by the Register; and

“(II) if a new entity is designated as the [mechanical licensing collective/digital licensee coordinator], adopt regulations to govern the transfer of licenses, funds, records, data, and administrative responsibilities from the existing mechanical licensing collective to the new entity.

The Congressional mandate to the Copyright Office is very broad–“soliciting information” could mean just about anything even remotely germane.  Given that the Copyright Office is to designate each of these crucially important offices empowered by Congress and to then measure their competency five years from now, it does seem that the Copyright Office would do well to give both the MLC and the DLC notice of what’s expected of each of them, and to do so before the designation is made.

For example, record keeping regarding customer service responsiveness, accuracy of the ownership database, overbudget or underbudget spending, complaints by songwriters, matching rates, number of audits of services undertaken, audit recoveries and distributions and executive compensation might all be relevant in the case of the MLC.

Some of these same criteria might be relevant for the DLC, although the DLC would have its own issues not common to the MLC.  These might include responsiveness of the DLC to potential blanket licensees, confidential treatment of competitive information, fair allocation of the assessment and communication with all licensees, especially the significant nonblanket licensees.

The Copyright Office would do well to recall the “seven anonymous amici” from the Microsoft antitrust litigation who were so dependent on Microsoft and so afraid of retaliation that they could not even use their own names to file an amicus brief in the case.  If the Copyright Office intends to have a candid assessment of either the MLC or the DLC, it might be a good idea to make an anonymous comment process available to competitors who fear retaliation.

If the Copyright Office makes a nonexhaustive list of qualities that constitute a successful completion of the five year trial period at the beginning of that period rather than the end, it might make succesful completion more likely.

Ethical Pool Discussion on Break the Business Podcast

Chris discusses the Ethical Pool model with Ryan Kairalla on the Break the Business podcast (see “Arithmetic on the Internet: The Ethical Pool Solution to Streaming Royalty Allocation“).