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CISAC to discuss expanding EU safe harbour reform around the world
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 28 May 2019
Song right collecting societies of the world will gather in Tokyo this week for the Annual General Assembly of CISAC, the global grouping of such rights organisations. And high on the agenda will be the recently passed European Copyright Directive, and how the music industry might seek similar safe harbour reform elsewhere in the world.
Pre-empting the discussions that are due to take place on Thursday, CISAC said yesterday that the safe harbour reforming article seventeen of the final version of the EU directive “enables fairer remuneration for creators when their works are used by digital platforms and clarifies that user-generated content services cannot benefit from misapplied ‘safe harbour’ protection”. CISAC now wants to consider “the global expansion of [those] principles”.
“Creators’ rights are a fundamental human right and I believe in them passionately”, CISAC President Jean-Michel Jarre added. “Yet, as history has shown, the advance of technology has created a never-ending struggle to keep the laws updated to each new era. In Europe we have seen the culmination of a four year effort to secure laws that will give creators a better deal when their works are used on digital networks. Now it is time for the global ‘ripple effect’, as we take this message to the rest of the world”.
Some of the other key conversations due to take place at this week’s annual general meeting will focus on more internal matters for CISAC. That includes efforts to speed up the issuing of new International Standard Musical Work Codes, the unique identifier that is required to identify and process payments for each individual song.
Also on the agenda will be the widely documented issues at Spanish collecting society SGAE. That includes a proposal on the table that it be temporarily excluded from CISAC for failing to deal with governance problems and outrage among the global music publishing community over how it distributes some key revenues.
