Royalty free music and Buy-Outs

IMPF questions any service that offers access to wide catalogues of royalty free music. This distorts competition, making it impossible for anyone signed with a CMO (collective management) to compete.

Furthermore, in many cases these royalty free catalogues stipulate that writers cannot be a member of a CMO, which in turn goes against the fundamental right to assign your copyrights any which way one sees fit.

Music creators are losing out on future earnings by these models of buy-out contracts. Audiovisual services and broadcasters online, such as Amazon, Disney, Netflix, are forcing music creators into a once off payment in exchange for their rights. As the audiovisual market represents a vital revenue stream for creators, such business models are an abomination.

IMPF demands in the first instance that a broadcaster should, as a priority, seek to ensure that authors are properly remunerated. Such a focus would ensure that the market is open to competition for the best creative content.

It has the potential to cause economic harm to streaming services providers, rightsholders, artists and advertisers, and to hurt artists by providing them with potentially misleading and artificial data, leaving them to either compete with artificially inflated stream counts or to consider engaging in these costly, unethical and improper practices themselves. In this regard, IMPF has signed a Code of Best Practice to combat stream manipulation which produces false streaming counts in relation to listening data. The coalition of signatories strives to detect and prevent stream manipulation to protect the rights of artists and creators online.

Collective Rights Management

IMPF works together with collective management organisations to promote greater transparency and better governance and to ensure that revenue is fairly collected and distributed to rightsholders.

IMPF recognises that having competing licensing models is healthy, and that common high standards of transparency, governance and accountability should be comparable across the board to allow for a level ground for competition.

Exceptions and limitations

IMPF believes that the three-step test used for exceptions and limitations to copyright protection, provides sufficient flexibility to individual countries to determine their own policies and provide access solutions in the digital environment. We believe that the licensing market generally works well, and that exceptions and limitations can ultimately limit copyright and in so doing stifle and discourage creative growth. In all cases, a balance of competing rights must be achieved. IMPF supports the existing international copyright framework which provides States with the possibility to introduce exceptions and limitations to address specific issues that are most relevant to their national laws and cultural and educational priorities. The optional nature of most existing exceptions reflects the diversity and richness of cultures and national related policies.

These platforms also act as a barrier to entry in the sense that licensed services are discouraged from entering the market for fear of not being able to compete with those benefiting from a free ride. The current unbalanced market has resulted in huge losses for creators and music publishers.

Acknowledged by the European Union as of grave concern, the Value Gap was included in the EU Copyright Directive. Article 17 aims to solve the problem by determining the liability of internet intermediaries.

While the Directive is a big step in the right direction, getting the platforms to “pay fair” for the music content they are generating big profits from, remains at the core of what music publishers and songwriters demand.

Private copying levies and cloud computing

IMPF believes that licensing should always be the preferred option where it is possible, practical and enforceable. The opportunities for licensing are constantly growing due to the rapid development of new online services. Nevertheless, this does not mean that levies should be abandoned as they are the optimal solution when monitoring the volume of private copying carried out is not feasible. Private copying levies aim to compensate rightsholders for losses from private copying of content. IMPF firmly believes in ensuring fair compensation for rightsholders in such situations. When determining whether certain content should be licensed or levied, critical questions need to be addressed. These include where and how data is stored and who has access to the files. It is important that the content to be distributed and stored is legal.

Considered by many composers, publishers and other rightsholders as a vital source of income, levies need to be set at a rate which ensures adequate compensation for rightsholders.

Territoriality

The concept of territoriality in music refers to the licensing of musical works to distributors and broadcasters based on linguistic or cultural markets. Territoriality in copyright application reflects the cultural and linguistic diversity of our world.

As music publishers, we have the incentive to license for as broad a territory as possible so as to yield increased revenue for our clients: songwriters and composers. Music publishers do not impose territorial restrictions but rather respond to or take heed of any restrictions in the market and normally successfully license multi-territorially.

Piracy online

Mass online theft not only diminishes the ability of songwriters and composers to earn a living, but it undermines the incentive to create new works and invest in innovation. Internet theft leads to a culture of disrespect for Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), a culture which threatens jobs, growth and cultural diversity. Music publishers are constantly adapting to new forms of exploitation by opening new revenue streams and raising public awareness about the importance of copyright protection. Unfortunately, these efforts are redundant without effective enforcement of IPRs. IMPF calls for active cooperation from ISPs to tackle online copyright infringement and supports the idea of educating the public, particularly young people in schools, on the nature and value of copyright law.

Free Trade Agreements

IMPF supports robust IP chapters in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). FTAs serve to reduce import tariffs, remove non-tariff barriers and give effective access to markets between the relevant partner countries. FTAs often include provisions on the protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and through the enhanced protection of IPRs abroad, publishers and artists may have greater possibilities to market their ideas and products in third countries. Under the principle of the most favoured nation, the highest standards of IP protection are applied to all trading partners to any agreement and this is particularly relevant to rightsholders operating in countries where a weak copyright protection framework exists. In general, FTAs can encourage better global harmonisation of IPRs and this in turn can create further incentives for content creation and cross-border exchange of protected works.

Cultural Diversity

IMPF strongly supports the UN Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and the Convention’s recognition of the importance of IPRs in sustaining cultural creativity.

There is a long and established tradition of music publishers, and independents in particular, driving cultural diversity through incorporating traditional melodies and investing in local and national repertories. Publishers remain particularly supportive of local culture and can communicate local works to larger markets and communities via established commercial networks.

Artificial Intelligence

On the regulation of Artificial Intelligence, June 2023

IMPF represents independent music publishers internationally. It is the global trade and advocacy body that helps stimulate a more favourable business and entrepreneurial environment for artistic, cultural, and commercial diversity for independent music publishers everywhere and the songwriters and composers they represent.

IMPF is actively engaged in the implications and applications of Artificial Intelligence and the impact it will undoubtedly have on the music sector and on the broader creative industries at international level. Given the rapid expansion of AI technology and its uses, and its increasing impact on the creative sectors, with the music and visual arts markets being flooded by AI-generated works that originate from the unauthorised scraping of copyright-protected works, regulatory developments in this area are critical and pressing. Artificial intelligence regulation requires an international approach, working together with the European Union, the USA, and other G7 members as the foundation models on which artificial intelligence in the music sector is based, can be trained in, and exported to any country in the world and, as music is by its nature cross-border. We take note that international developments are converging on some key issues: namely Labelling, Transparency, Copyright and Accountability.

Regarding labelling: IMPF believes AI generated music should be classified and tagged as AI generated music. Such an approach would alert both commercial users and consumers about the nature and origin of the music. Generative artificial intelligence must not be used to create disinformation in any creative sector, be it text, images, audio, or video. At a societal level the potential damage is most clearly exhibited in the context of deep fakes; but with increasing technological capabilities, artificially generated music will damage not only the reputation of specific artists but also flood the music market. We anticipate that human created music will coexist with machine manufactured music, but we must learn lessons from the past and lay the groundwork now for this to be on a level playing field. Therefore, we need clear labelling of AI generated music.

Regarding Transparency: Foundation models are trained on vast amounts of datasets to enable them to carry out a wide range of tasks and operations – for music that means composition. It is paramount that in this part of the training process AI producers keep transparent records about the specific datasets used in the training process; such transparency is a condition sine qua non for any further activities of music publishers such as remuneration and potential infringement procedures. In the wider context transparency is paramount for eliminating biases within AI applications.

On Copyright: Evidently, the datasets used by foundation models will generally consist of musical works protected by copyright. For companies using such foundation models that offer commercial AI assisted, as well as AI generated music, applications must be required to get permission from the composer and their music publisher respectively. Notably, our members have not yet been approached for such permissions, and consequently, already available as well as future AI applications are infringing copyright. It is the main activity of music publishers to license the use of musical works in cooperation with the original composer if it is in their personal and commercial interest. Some rights holders want their music to be used in such a way, some don’t; it is their choice. In the absence of a meaningful recourse against copyright infringement it is difficult to enforce our rights in practice, in particular for individual composers or smaller independent music publishers.

On accountability: Effective allocation of legal responsibility for AI systems is essential for rightsholders to be in a position to contest AI outcomes that infringe their rights. Regulators must develop a framework for rightsholders to enforce their rights when AI generated works are potentially infringing them, be it by holding AI developers legally responsible for facilitating generative AI tools that have been trained on copyright- rotected works without authorisation, and thus stripping rightsholders of their right to consent to the use of their works, or holding platforms liable for the upload and dissemination of potentially infringing AI-generated works.

We call therefore on national governments and intergovernmental institutions to effect measures that address these practical aspects pertaining to the roll out of Artificial Intelligence, so as to fully guard the rights of music publishers, songwriters and composers everywhere. IMPF is adamant that the protection of human artists’ copyright and livelihood should be explicitly acknowledged and provided for in any AI regulation, and we look forward to our ongoing engagement with the EU, UK, USA, and other territories in this regard.