[Focus] Music composers gear up for royalty fight
HELENA SPONGENBERG
19.09.2006 @ 17:17 CET
EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - Innovation and diversity in European music could be limited if Brussels opens up the European system of collecting royalty payments to competition, says the head of the international council of authors and composers of music (CIAM).
The European system of bodies that collect the royalty payments from various individuals and groups for their copyright holders, such as music composers and songwriters, has been in place for more than 150 years.
"We're facing the break-up of author's rights and the introduction of Anglo-American copyright" (Photo: Pia Raug)
Pia Raug, a Danish musician, is fighting for what she calls the survival of Europe's national collecting societies, which the European Commission would like to see being opened up to a competitive market resulting in fewer and bigger cross-border licensing groups.
"How is competition between two or three societies better than 25 that have local knowledge? It will only create a monopoly," said Ms Raug, who speaks on behalf of 2 million authors around the world.
She believes that if the market was opened up to competition, as a 2005 commission recommendation on cross-border collective management of copyright suggests, the big music and entertainment companies, which already own radio stations and record shops, would quickly take over and control the European music market.
"They want to narrow down the output of diversity to increase power on the world market, which is fine if you're running a business, but not if you are a composer," she stated.
"This is a very bad strategy for the future," she said, explaining that more competition would mean less money, which in turn would lead to a decline in the quality of music as companies would only invest in mainstream tastes, hampering musical innovation.
In many countries part of the money collected by the societies for the performers and composers is invested in cultural developments such as grants to inspire new talent and music awards.
Ms Raug believes these national investments in cultural events will also disappear if just a few bigger companies were administering authors' rights.
Born in the French Revolution
It was in 1791, during the French Revolution, that intellectual property rights – or droit d'auteur – was born, when the right to one's own intellectual property came to be seen as a human right.
Fifty years later, a court case brought by composer Alexandre Bourget led to the creation of the world's first collecting society, the French SACEM.
The movement spread across the continent and over the next 70 years collecting societies were set up across Europe as musicians started working for the market instead of being employed by, for example, the royal courts.
Collecting societies have developed differently and undergone modernisation through international agreements since then. In some European countries, the collecting society includes composers, writers and singers while in other EU member states several collecting societies only focus on one group and their particular work - such as music, literature, audio-visual works or "multimedia" productions.
In some countries the recording industry is even part of the collective management. But what ever the step-up, they are generally agreed that they are now facing their toughest challenge.
"We're facing the break-up of author's rights and the introduction of Anglo-American copyright," Ms Raug told the EUobserver.
The fundamental difference between intellectual property and copyright is that with intellectual property rights the rights holder will always be the creator of the work, while with copyright, someone else can buy the full rights to a work.
"If we want to make our point come across, we need to speak as we would sing a song," argued Ms Raug, explaining that they are artists rather than politicians.
She decided to join the Danish collecting society KODA more than 20 years ago after she unexpectedly received a cheque with royalties – even though she was not a member - after some of her songs had been played in the radio.
"The collecting societies work on a system of equality where the small and the big stars are treated equally. I like that kind of solidarity, which is why I joined in the first place," she added.
"The fight for intellectual property rights have united us as an organisation, both in the different genres and geographically," says Ms Raug.
"We hope to make politicians understand why this is vital to us and if we can't stop them, we want to at least make them feel bad about destroying a well-functioning system."
To read more on this topic click here for EUobserver's special FOCUS on Creative Rights