Some Cautionary Tales About Collective Licensing
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Collective licensing occurs where a single agent is empowered to license uses on behalf of many individual copyright holders. Agents can be empowered voluntarily, with copyright holders opting in to permit licensing of their works, or they can be established or empowered by statute. Collective licensing has been suggested as a possible solution for the obstacle copyright law places in the path of new uses of works enabled by innovative technologies. Collective licensing does have the potential to reduce transaction costs when a large number of works are licensed to a large number of users, thereby benefiting both rightsholders and users. However, the track record of collective organizations (CROs), the entities that manage collective licenses, reveals that they often fail to live up to that potential. Although there are a wide variety of CROs operating under divergent legal frameworks, many unfortunately share the characteristic of serving their own interests at the expense of artists and the public. In discussions of copyright policy, lawmakers generally consider two broad stakeholder groups: authors on the one hand and the general public on the other. This paper will examine how CROs have done significant harm to each of the groups they are supposed to help.
Source: bepress Legal Repository
Authors: Brandon Collins Butler, Jonathan Band
Language: English
Topic: Intellectual Property Law
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2235732221