Our industry’s global average is 75/25 to songwriters.
Ralph Peer II
Today, ICMP and a long list of Europe’s creative sectors - ranging from TV, sports, film, book publishers, songwriters, football, telecommunications services and photo agencies - have written to European Commissioner for the Internal Market Mr. Thierry Breton outlining their concerns about the transposition of ‘Article 17’ of the 2019 Copyright Directive.
Article 17 addresses the Value Gap for copyright protected content online such as millions of musical works. Article 17 clarifies that User Uploaded content (UUC) services such as YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Snap etc. are liable under existing EU copyright law for the millions of works they make available and profit from online, therefore they should take a full and fair licence with the rightholders for those creative works. This seeks to fix a drastic licensing, valuation and indeed Digital Singe Market competition issue.
The European Commission is currently drafting non-binding Guidance to the 27 EU governments as to how Article 17 could work in practice. ICMP continues to input to that European Commission process and work with national governments, while at the same time countering ‘Big Tech’ services’ ongoing attempts to water down and obviate the law.
See the cross-sectoral here.
See ICMP Director General’s statement below.