WIPO Digital Rightsholders Conference Ponders Business Ideas 25/04/2016 by Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Last week’s World Intellectual Property Organization conference on the digital content business gathered speakers from different sectors of industry, from content producers to authors and performers. Rightsholders and others gave updates and tried to advance strategies for managing rights in a digital market. The WIPO Conference on the Global Digital Content Market took place from 21-22 April. It was made up of a series of panels [pdf]. Streaming Services Antagonise Performers On 21 April a panel gathered several performers, and a representative of the music industry. Streaming services such as Spotify were targeted by the performers as providing very low income to artists. Edgar Berger, chairman & chief executive officer, international, Sony Music Entertainment, based in Wolfsburg, Germany, said paid subscriptions are the way forward and the biggest challenge is to create a level playing field where everybody plays by the same rules. Luis Cobos, a Spanish conductor and composer, underlined how profits from streaming services are being distributed. The minimal remuneration to artists and creators puts the future of creation in danger, he said. Imogen Heap, English singer and songwriter, said musicians need to be part of the conversation on remuneration. She said that “labels have done rather well,” and the question is how to make it easy for fans to get the music legally. She suggested an open global music database coupled with Blockchain, which she said was created to host bitcoin transactions, on which authors could manage their rights and which is entirely transparent. Christopher Tin, a composer from the United States, said for classical music, streaming is “a nightmare” for different reasons, one of which is that classical music has an older audience who may not be familiar with new technology, and with streaming there is a loss in music fidelity through the audio recording and so “the quality of our product is actually getting worse.” Tammy Weis, Canadian singer and songwriter, underlined the necessity of having funding from existing work to be able to create more music. Not the End of Paper Yet One of the panels focused on publishing and looked into the transformations brought by the digitisation of books and new digital distribution platforms. Panel on publishing YoungSuk “YS” Chi, chairman of the Elsevier Foundation in New York, said the industry has to learn to be ambidextrous and work with the paper format and the highly technical digital world. John Makinson, chairman of Penguin Random House in New York, said for his part that the move to digital content has been a relatively straightforward journey. The single copy purchase is still what consumers prefer, he said. The big disruptive change has not been how content is made but how it goes to the consumer. This preference for paper books was confirmed by Trasvin Jittidecharak, publisher, Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, in Thailand, and echoed by Federico Polak, an author from Buenos Aires, who said however that paper books might disappear for legal publications. Prices of ebooks are almost the same as their paper counterparts, and Chi said the production cost for ebooks is greatly reduced for replication, but for the first copy of an ebook it is a lot more expensive than for a paper book. Competition is very important even in learning material, said Chi, who warned against governments having a monopoly on such material, which “would essentially kill the publishing industry” in developing countries. In developing countries, the publishing industry starts with learning material publishing, he said. The lack of publishing companies in developing countries, will lead to the fact that “they will become perpetual importers of learning material.” On copyright infringement, Chi said the “three E’s” should be emphasised: Educating people about the fact that stealing content in the digital world is still stealing; Economics, since if book is unaffordable people are tempted to steal it (and publishers understand where the threshold is), and Enforcement. “We need to develop new skills,” Makinson said, “but the core business is publishing great books and that can’t change.” New Project on Identifiers for Works Dominic Young, chief executive officer of the Copyright Hub Foundation, presented the Copyright Hub, a technology aimed at creating single identifiers for all kind of works, which will allow users to know about the intellectual property rights status of those works. The declaration of rights should be made easy, he said, and should be accessible to anyone who wants to manage their rights, and in the long term, the goal is to have a trusted and orderly market place. During a side event to the conference, Godfrey Rust, consultant at the Linked Content Coalition, a global consortium of standards bodies and registries, said the Copyright Hub answers the issue of the millions of works that are “born orphans” coming from people who load things onto the internet. Even for more established content, he said, it is difficult to find information on works, in particular on licensing requirements. For this reason, automation is needed, he said, and the information has to be translated in computer readable codes. Speakers at the side event said the project has just only started and seeks to expand its scope. According to an explanatory document [pdf], the Copyright Hub Foundation was set up with the help of the United Kingdom, United States, and Australian creative and tech industries, and the British government. The foundation says it aims at helping launch as many applications of the technology as possible from 2016 to 2018. This is targeted across all sectors of the creative industries as a way to gain critical mass. Conference Informative rather than Normative WIPO Director General Francis Gurry Asked by Intellectual Property Watch on the general absence of reference to WIPO’s normative work on copyright, and in particular the Standing Committee on Copyright and related Rights (SCCR), Gurry said “the main idea of the conference was informative rather than normative.” “This is a well informed audience” which knows what the developments are in this area, he said. The conference serves to take the temperature of what is happening in the digital content marketplace, he added. Gurry said the conference was financed by WIPO. Image Credits: WIPO Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related Catherine Saez may be reached at csaez@ip-watch.ch."WIPO Digital Rightsholders Conference Ponders Business Ideas" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
[…] answer is NO. For a summary of the main topics discussed at the WIPO Conference, see the IP Watch summary from Catherine […] Reply