[Editor Charlie sez: This tinkering with the board seats changes the songwriter vote from 2/10 to 4/14, a change from 20% to 28% on the new collective created by the MMA, aka the self-licking ice cream cone. This board structure is still wildly out of sync with every other creator collective in the world and will no doubt be opposed by ex-US writers. Remember–the MMA covers all songs ever written or that ever will be written, including both US and ex-US works exploited in the US. If the last compulsory license is a guide, the MMA will last 100 years after the Spotify IPO. And still does nothing to police the mass NOIs that are filed every day. But good news about extracting support for Google-opposed Copyright Small Claims Court.]
What the law ultimately says is up to members of the House and Senate, who will write the legislation and the subsequent regulations, but in the meantime, negotiations…have resulted in a proposal that allows songwriters and composers to have four seats on the now-expanded 14-seat board of directors, instead of the initially allotted two seats for songwriters on a smaller 10-seat board; while the unclaimed royalties oversight committee will now be evenly divided between publishers and songwriters. It also has resulted in additional clarifications to how payouts from unclaimed funds are distributed.
While the…the NSAI and SONA…had already come out in favor of the proposed legislation, the Songwriters Guild Of America initially withheld endorsing the legislation, saying it had some reservations about elements of it. But now SGA president Rick Carnes says his group is on board….
As part of the proposed changes, Carnes says that exclusionary clauses in older songwriter/publishers contracts sometimes prevent songwriters from collecting royalties because that clause allows publishers to take the stance that they don’t have to share the money with songwriters if it comes in unattributed to a song. “We tried to clarify that language so songwriters can get their fair share,” Carnes says.
In another move, as part of the negotiations with songwriters, the publishing community has “pledged to lend its full support on Capitol Hill to secure quick passage” of the pending Copyright Alternative In Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act of 2017, which will provide music creators with an alternative to a full blown copyright infringement actions against unlicensed users of music.
Artist Rights Watch--News for the Artist Rights Advocacy Community 