Posts Tagged: "publishers"

The U.S. Copyright Office recently published a Notice in the Federal Register regarding Title I of the Orrin G. Hatch – Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act (MMA). This section of the law created a new blanket licensing system that governs the licensed uses of musical works by digital music providers. In this recent notice, the Copyright Office is seeking input to identify entities which are appropriate for inclusion in the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) that will manage the new blanket licensing system.

An analysis of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated led the appellate court to find that the annotations, while not having the force of law, are part and parcel of the law. First, the Eleventh Circuit found that the Georgia General Assembly was the driving force behind the annotations in the OCGA. Although the annotations were prepared by LexisNexis, those annotations were drafted based upon highly detailed instructions contained within its publishing agreement with the Code Revision Commission, making Georgia’s legislators the creators of the annotations.

The $43.5 million from the recent Spotify settlement will reportedly go towards a separate fund to compensate publishers and songwriters. Such payments made by Spotify and other streaming services to copyright owners are known as mechanical royalties. Mechanical royalties are usually paid when a copy of a song is made, such as when a music publisher creates a CD containing copyright-protected songs. Although Spotify doesn’t sell or distribute physical media, it does owe mechanical royalties when it streams a copy of a song to a user.