This research examines the disharmony in the regulation of music licensing in Indonesia from the perspective of copyright protection, focusing on the implications of the misalignment between national regulations and international agreements on the enforceability of licensing agreements between creators and copyright holders. The research employs a normative legal method, utilizing a statute approach and a conceptual approach. The statute approach is used to analyze the provisions in the Copyright Act and related regulations, while the conceptual approach is employed to discuss the legal concepts underlying music licensing regulations and copyright protection in both global and national contexts. The findings of this research indicate that the disharmony in music licensing regulations creates legal uncertainty, which harms the position of creators in licensing agreements. Furthermore, this misalignment also impedes the protection of the exclusive rights of creators as stipulated in international instruments such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the TRIPS Agreement. Therefore, this research recommends the need for regulatory harmonization, strengthening the institutional role of Collective Management Organizations (CMOs), and establishing a more transparent national licensing clause standard, in order to create legal certainty and more effectively protect the creators' copyright.

This study examines the implementation of direct and indirect license systems in copyright royalty management, particularly in the music sector, by comparing the regulatory frameworks of Indonesia and the United States. In Indonesia, copyright royalties are predominantly managed through a collective licensing system via LMK (Collective Management Organizations) and LMKN (National Collective Management Organization). Although the legal framework permits licensing directly between creators and users, the lack of explicit regulation on direct licenses creates legal uncertainty and risks overlapping claims. In contrast, the United States recognizes and regulates direct licenses under the Copyright Act of 1976, allowing copyright owners to manage their economic rights independently or through Performing Rights Organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. This legal certainty enables greater flexibility, negotiation power, and transparency for creators and industry stakeholders. The study employs a normative-empirical legal method, combining statutory analysis with interviews, to explore how Indonesia might benefit from clearer legal provisions to support a dual licensing approach. Strengthening legal clarity on direct licensingcould ensure fairness, legal certainty, and adaptability for both creators and music industry actors in Indonesia’s growing creative economy.

Copyright law underpins the modern music industry, with performing rights organisations (PROs) playing a crucial role beyond compensating creators. They act as gatekeepers, shaping access to music, influencing industry structures, and mediating relationships between artists, publishers, and digital platforms. This paper examines how the PRO sector adapts to technological disruptions and evolving market dynamics, particularly in the United States. The U.S. landscape, marked by multiple competing PROs, regulatory oversight, and complex licensing, serves as a key case study for global industry trends. Analysing six organisations-BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, Merlin, AMRA, and ICE-the study identifies distinct organisational cultures: traditional PROs emphasise growth, advocacy, and partnerships, while digital-native PROs prioritise transparency, innovation, and efficiency. The findings suggest that digitalisation fosters specialised PROs that challenge incumbents and reshape global music licensing. This study contributes to discussions on copyright management, industry gatekeeping, and the implications of digital transformation for music rights governance.

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) has become a major public policy issue in Washington across a range of industries. The copyright community has also been focused on AI policy, most notably over the issues of training AI models on copyrighted works and the copyrightability of generative AI. This Article focuses on AI training. Copyright issues surrounding training are currently the subject of significant litigation in U.S. district courts, predominantly the Southern District of New York in which the fair use defense has been raised by AI companies. Copyright issues surrounding AI training may very well reach the U.S. Supreme Court. There is certainly enough money at risk on both sides of the issue to make it likely that at least once of the many current cases will eventually be heard by the Court. If the Supreme Court determines that a license is not generally required, the licensing question (and the basis for this Article) ends the day such a decision is announced. If, however, the Supreme Court determines that a license is often required, Congressional action to enable either collective or compulsory license may be needed in certain circumstances even though direct licensing has already occurred and will no doubt continue. From 2004 to 2007, I served as copyright counsel to then-House Judiciary Charmain James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin during which time I led weekly Congressional negotiations over two copyright bills. The first bill was an update to the Section 115 compulsory music licensing system. The legislation, titled the Section 115 Reform Act, was designed to modernize a paper-based licensing system for the digital music services era. The second bill, titled the Orphan Works Act, was a copyright industry-wide bill to address the longstanding orphan works licensing problem on a work-by-work basis. Neither bill was signed into law by Congress, although an updated version of the Section 115 Reform Act later became the now-enacted Music Modernization Act of 2018. One could also say that the Music Modernization Act proved that Congressional staff never leave since I was the lead negotiator on that bill as well. Although none of these three bills had anything directly to do with AI, Congress often builds upon what it has previously debated or enacted as a basis for future legislation. Thus, it is possible that the prior music licensing and orphan works bills could provide some basis for AI licensing legislation.

I was asked to participate in The Kernochan Center’s Symposium addressing “Past, Present and Future of Copyright Licensing.” I noted that in light of my current role on the United States Copyright Royalty Board, my presentation and discussion participation would focus on the past and the present of statutory Copyright Licensing in the United States. I chose to exclude any personal outlook on the future of Copyright Licensing, leaving that to other participants. The same holds true for this Article, which adheres to the topics addressed in my presentation. Thus, as the Symposium and the public look to potential licensing solutions that may emerge amidst the development of Artificial Intelligence products, my hope is to offer a brief, and high-level, background on how the United States has approached statutory licensing in the copyright realm. In doing so, I often look to the Register of Copyright’s 2015/2016 study, Copyright and the Music Marketplace, and recommend that study as a far more comprehensive portrait of the music licensing landscape at it existed at the time—prior to the enactment of the Music Modernization Act in 2018. Additional Copyright Office publications are available with more comprehensive information regarding the statutory licenses addressed herein.

‘The Complexities of Music Licensing in the Digital Environment and the United States’ Music Modernization Act “Solution”

Initially designed to protect intellectual property (IP) of digitalized information goods such as music, games, or books, existing centralized digital rights management (DRM) systems mostly serve the interests of major publishers, with scant inclusion of rights owners, creators, and consumers. Although various blockchain-based DRM systems have been proposed, most of them mirror existing counterproductive IP restrictions. Analyzing the music industry as a case in point, this paper proposes design principles for blockchain-based DRM systems that provide an integrated and flexible solution by enabling transparent music licensing structures, consistent and complete rights metadata, and efficient and transparent royalty payout. The solution can be achieved by storing rights metadata on a public distributed ledger, by validating metadata through a consensus mechanism on a permissioned blockchain, and by algorithmically enforcing royalty payout via stablecoin through a smart contract. The design principles were evaluated by industry experts, validating their benefit for the music industry by increasing surplus value that is currently destroyed through previous suboptimal designs.

The Role of Market-Driven and Legislative Solutions to Online Music Licensing in Europe

While it is clear, and arguably has been for the last five years, that paid subscription streaming is the future of the music industry, the law has failed to keep pace with “modern consumer preferences and technological developments in the music marketplace.” The Music Modernization Act of 2018 (MMA), which amends the U.S. copyright law, 17 U.S.C., is Congress’s effort to keep pace with the music industry by fixing our cumbersome and inefficient music licensing system. The MMA is a step in the right direction, but it falls short of Congress’s goal. Focusing on Title I of the MMA—the Music Licensing Modernization Act—I argue that, aside from creating a compulsory blanket mechanical license for musical works, Title I of the MMA has done very little to improve business transactions in the music marketplace. Moreover, instead of “present[ing] a series of balanced tradeoffs among interested parties to create a fairer, more efficient, and more rational system for all,” Title I of the MMA hyper-

Introduction: Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) are a growing problem in men >50 years old and they are often related to benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Retrograde ejaculation is a major pitfall of BPH surgical treatment. To overcome this pitfall, Madigan described, in 1990, a simple prostatectomy with preservation of prostatic urethra for large benign prostate. With this technique higher rates of postoperative antegrade ejaculation were achieved. Later, laparoscopic and robot-assisted techniques were also developed and published with solid benefits in terms of blood loss, bladder irrigation, bladder catheterization time, hospital stay, and, more relevantly, ejaculatory function. With urethra-sparing technique, postoperative anterograde ejaculation rates were as high as 81%. However, according to data, urethra-sparing simple prostatectomy is only being performed for large size prostates (>80–100 g). There is no record of applying urethra-sparing simple prostatectomy to average size prostate (30–80 g). Materials and Methods: We present a laparoscopic urethra-sparing simple prostatectomy performed in a patient with a 50 g prostate (transrectal ultrasound) willing to undergo BPH-related surgery and wishing maintaining anterograde ejaculatory function. Results: With the use of this technique on an average size prostate, all the previously named benefits were achieved, namely discharge 2 days after surgery with no bladder catheter and normal anterograde ejaculatory function at follow-up. Conclusions: Although currently excluded from the main BPH average size prostate surgical management algorithms, we strongly believe this technique may be a paradigm shift in surgical management of bothering LUTS in patients with prostates 40 to 100 g, wishing to preserve normal ejaculatory function. Patient Consent: Authors have received and archived patient consent for video recording/publication in advance of video recording of procedure. There were no conflicts of interest or obligations resulting from this study. There were no commercial associations during the past three years that might create a conflict of interest in connection with the video. Runtime of video: 4 mins 59 secs Music License: Hard Boiled by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3857-hard-boiled License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Legal Framework for Music Licensing and Protection of Creatives in the Nigerian Music Industry

Legal Framework for Music Licensing and Protection of Creatives in the Nigerian Music Industry

Copyright collectives are critical to the economic health of the music industry, but they are at a curious crossroads. Collective copyright management is used more extensively in the music business than ever before. Expanded collective copyright management for digital streaming is the centerpiece of the Music Modernization Act (MMA)—the most extensive revision to the Copyright Act in two decades. At the same time, major music publishers, who rely heavily on collective licensing revenue, are on a years-long mission to end collective licensing for certain digital streaming rights. These trends reflect changes that streaming technology has caused in music consumption, distribution, and revenue generation.
 Digital streaming has emerged as the dominant music consumption model, accounting for eighty-three percent of music revenues in the United States in 2020. This rapid rise to dominance naturally has profound implications for the future of music licensing. The licensing needs of streaming service providers are unprecedented in scale. Spotify, for example, currently hosts over 70 million recordings, with more than 60,000 new recordings uploaded every day. Most of these recordings encompass two copyrighted works that must be licensed separately: a copyrighted sound recording and a copyrighted underlying musical composition. Streaming services’ need for such a massive number of licenses highlights the value of collectives that enable streaming services to interface with a manageable number of licensors. It also highlights the importance of blanket licenses that permit spontaneous use of millions of works relatively free from infringement liability.
 At the same time, the importance of collective licensing to copyright owners has decreased in the streaming age. Streaming is a highly concentrated market: Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music together control two-thirds of the global streaming market. Thus, it has never been easier for copyright owners to license a handful of platforms that deliver the lion’s share of revenue. Further, technology has markedly reduced the costs of use-tracking and royalty distribution. All streams are automatically logged, and royalties are automatically distributed based on usage data. As a result, the major record labels often directly license millions of sound recordings to streaming services without using a collective.
 Historically, collective copyright management has been valuable for both copyright owners and users of copyrighted works. The primary advantage is reduced transaction costs. Across the globe, there are millions of music copyright owners and millions of businesses that use copyrighted works. In some cases, individual transactions for large numbers of works would be prohibitively costly for both sides. Collective copyright management creates a one-stop shop for licensors and licensees, drastically reducing transaction costs. Collective copyright management further benefits copyright owners by sharing and thereby reducing administrative and enforcement costs. It further benefits users by reducing potential liability for frequent and spontaneous uses, especially through blanket licensing that empowers licensees to make unlimited use of all works in a licensor’s catalog.
 The major concern with collective licensing has long been the monopoly pricing potential of collective copyright control, especially when collective licensing is combined with blanket licensing. If one entity holds the rights to license the majority of popular songs, it can exact monopoly rents from anyone seeking to use music. Radio stations, streaming services, nightclubs, and other music-centric businesses would have no latitude to seek alternatives if the rights to license the music they need were concentrated in one entity. Music licensing, therefore, has long been a heavily regulated market, controlled through a combination of compulsory licensing regimes, statutory limitations and exceptions to exclusive copyright rights, and competition authority oversight.
 The question is whether such heavy regulation is necessary going forward—or, more to the point, whether collective licensing is necessary going forward. Collective licensing has dominated the music public performance rights market for a century. The two major performance rights organizations (PROs)—American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI)—offer blanket licenses for millions of works, albeit under strict regulation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to deter market power abuses. But this model increasingly seems like a vestige of the analog age. Today, there is a relative handful of high-value licensees operating globally. Streaming services have the technological infrastructure to work with a huge number of licensors, unlike the radio stations and nightclubs of yore. Because technology enables nearly frictionless virtual licensing and automated usage tracking and royalty distribution, a plethora of music rights and royalty administration businesses have flourished that are capable of administering direct public performance rights licensing and royalty collection on copyright holders’ behalf. The performance licensing that still involves high transaction costs—licensing of radio stations and brick-and-mortar businesses such as stores, fitness studios, and bars—accounts for less than fifteen percent of PRO revenues. Further, as I discuss in Part IV.B, licensing even in those arenas is vulnerable to disruption.
 The upshot is that music publishers, especially major publishers, are eager to eschew collective licensing in the digital streaming space so they can negotiate higher direct-licensing fees for streaming. As I discuss in Part III.C.3, publishers’ plans have been derailed for the time being by DOJ consent decrees that prohibit PROs from selectively licensing members’ works. Many licensees, on the other hand, are generally satisfied with how collective licensing currently functions in the performance rights space. The two major PROs are so heavily regulated that their blanket license offerings are comparable to compulsory licenses: The PROs’ pricing and licensing discretion is substantially curtailed under rate court and DOJ oversight. Meanwhile, competition from a new PRO (which poaches some of the legacy PROs’ most valuable catalog) and from a burgeoning music rights administration industry adds further pressure, casting doubt on the long-term viability of the legacy PROs. If the legacy PROs deteriorate and publishers seek direct licenses for performance rights, will licensees lobby for a blanket compulsory performance rights license?
 There is precedent for such a compulsory license, as a new compulsory blanket licensing regime came into effect in 2021, mandated by the MMA, for a related right: the right to make and distribute phonorecords of nondramatic musical works, including by means of “digital phonorecord delivery.” In essence, this is a compulsory license for the right to digitally deliver—via download or stream—a copyrighted song encompassed in a sound recording. The MMA also created a new collective—the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) (so-called because the compulsory license covers what was traditionally called the “mechanical right,” or the right to reproduce musical works in formats used for mechanical playback)—to administer the compulsory license. The MMA comes two decades after the creation of another compulsory right prompted by digital streaming: the compulsory right available to “noninteractive” digital music services (essentially, internet radio webcasters and satellite radio broadcasters) to transmit sound recordings. A bespoke licensing collective, SoundExchange, was created to administer that compulsory license as well. In total, the licensing landscape for the U.S. digital music streaming sector involves six collectives: the MLC, SoundExchange, and four PROs. The only licenses in the streaming landscape not administered by licensing collectives are licenses for the use of sound recordings by “interactive” streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify. These direct licenses also happen to be by far the most lucrative licenses in the music business.
 The two compulsory streaming licenses of relatively recent vintage (and their respective collectives) seem entrenched for the foreseeable future. However, uncertainty surrounds the future of streaming performance royalties. Will major publishers seek to direct-license streaming performances and withdraw their rights from PROs? Will they seek instead to phase out streaming performance royalties in favor of a single, all-encompassing musical composition royalty stream managed by the MLC? Or will they maintain the status quo: music composition streaming royalties split into performance and mechanical royalties administered and distributed by five or more different collectives. In the long term, the third possibility seems the least likely due to the inefficiencies and lack of flexibility in the current structure. The other possibilities would not be costless, however, as bypassing the PROs for streaming royalties would markedly weaken—if not ruin—the PROs on which publishers would still rely for non-streaming performance royalties.
 In this Article, I examine the present state of collective copyright management and collective licensing in the United States and identify the factors likely to determine the future of collective copyright management due to new usage tracking technology and the rise of digital streaming. In Part I, I lay the terminological groundwork for subsequent discussion by defining and distinguishing the related concepts of collective licensing, direct licensing, compulsory licensing, blanket licensing, and collective copyright management. In Part II, I lay the necessary doctrinal

Isues and Implications of Music Copyright License Fes on OTT

Distribution Of Unmatched Accrued Royalties Under The Music Licensing Modernization Act Of 2018

The paper continues to review ideas, technologies and solutions discussed at the London Book Fair 2019. There are two through lines of technology development. First, our “new” technology is derivative of earlier technologies, similar to Darwinian evolution. Second, each of those earlier technologies resulted in upheaval, uncertainty, and unrest. The blockchain platform is already taking a transformative role in supply chain management, music licensing, recordkeeping. Rights transactions for creative works happen in myriad ways. First you have a book deal, then video deal, then e-book licensing deal or a video game deal or a merchandising deal. With blockchain, all those deals can be united in a “smart contract”. The launch by the European Research Council of the Coalition S consortium with the goal of making “full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality” was a major development in open access last year. Open access must be based on a sustainable model. Copyright was created to encourage and reward creativity. We should not expect copyright to constantly contort itself into something for which it was not intended. Policy focus is now on democratizing knowledge” and ensuring as many people as possible can tap into this rich natural resource of mankind.

Blockchain-mediated Licensing: Legal Engineering for Artist Empowerment

Companies who use music or video to entertain customers need to maintain compliance with the “performance” provisions of the Copyright Act. Many businesses assume they are automatically exempt from paying royalties under the Copyright Act's Homestyle Exemption or the Fairness in Music Licensing Act of, 1998. Companies are often surprised to find they owe royalties to Performance Rights Organizations. This article discusses the Copyright Act and the compliance issues associated with playing copyrighted works within a business. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The licensing process of copyrighted materials, especially songs and music for a film, is one of the responsibilities that a producer should fulfill, aside from other responsibilities like financing the film and managing all the needs of the cast and crew. However, the knowledge and awareness about copyright and music licensing are still very low in Indonesia. In this research, the writer will find out about the process of music licensing for a short movie. Through this research, we will look into the music licensing process for film, and national and international film festivals. Keywords: Producer, Music Licensing, Short Movie

In music licensing, powerful music publishers have begun—for the first time ever— to withdraw their digital copyrights from the collectives that license those rights, in order to negotiate considerably higher rates in private deals. At the beginning of the year, two of these publishers commanded a private royalty rate nearly twice that of the going collective rate. This result could be seen as a coup for the free market: Constrained by consent decrees and conflicting interests, collectives are simply not able to establish and enforce a true market rate in the new, digital age. This could also be seen as a pathological form of private ordering: Powerful licensors using their considerable market power to impose a supracompetitive rate on a hapless licensee. While there is no way to know what the market rate looks like in a highly regulated industry like music publishing, the anticompetitive effects of these withdrawals may have detrimental consequences for artists, licensees and consumers. In industries such as music licensing, network effects, parallel pricing and tacit collusion can work to eliminate meaningful competition from the marketplace. The resulting lack of competition threatens to stifle innovation in both the affected, and related, industries.\nNormally, where a market operates in a workably competitive manner, the remedy for anticompetitive behavior can be found in antitrust law. In music licensing, however, some concerning behaviors, including both parallel pricing and tacit collusion, do not rise to the level of antitrust violations; as such, they cannot be addressed by antitrust law. This is no small irony. At one point, antitrust served as a check on the licensing collectives by establishing consent decrees to govern behavior. Due to a series of acquisitions that have reduced the music publishing industry to a mere three entities, the collectives that are being circumvented by these withdrawals (and whose conduct is governed by consent decrees) now pose less of a competitive concern than do individual publishing companies acting privately, or in concert through tacit collusion. The case of intellectual property rights, which defer competition for creators and inventors for a limited period of time, is particularly challenging for antitrust.\nRunning contrary to conventional wisdom, this Article posits that regulation—not antitrust—is the optimal means of enabling entry and innovation in the music licensing market. While regulation is conventionally understood to restrict new entry and to interfere with competition, this Article demonstrates that where a market becomes highly concentrated, regulation can actually encourage competition by ensuring access to key inputs at competitive rates. While not without its drawbacks, including an increase in the cost of private action, remedial regulation in music licensing corrects anticompetitive behavior and ensures ongoing access to content and fair payment to artists, while supporting continued innovation in content distribution.