RSSEU Investigating Royalty Collectors
By Ed Oswald | Published February 7, 2006, 11:09 AM
The European Commission will open an investigation into the way that music rights holders are collecting royalties from Internet sites operating within the European Union, antitrust regulators said on Tuesday.
Current laws require a service to obtain a license to operate within each country, which can make the process of offering digital music within the EU very costly. Fees are paid to the country's arm of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, known as CISAC.
Regulators claim that this could be a violation of the EU's restrictive business practices law and give these agencies a monopoly. Membership rules state that authors can only choose the CISAC that represents their country, and makes it impossible for other collection agencies to start their business.
Similarly, it causes a problem where services like iTunes, Napster, or satellite and cable broadcasters have to obtain a license from each country's organization, a lengthy process.
The EC believes this may have to do with Europe's lagging online music sales. Although the EU has a significantly larger population than the US, music sales in 2004 were only an eighth of the US' $248 million in revenue.
A Europe-wide system would help even the score, the EU believes, as well as make it easier for services like iTunes to operate within the region. The Commission has given CISAC two months to respond, and could face a fine if they are found guilty.
The CISAC was not available for comment.
"The EC believes this may have to do with Europe's lagging online music sales. Although the EU has a significantly larger population than the US, music sales in 2004 were only an eighth of the US' $248 million in revenue."
no, were just smarter, and P2P our music. why pay for summit if you can have it for free.
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|To be on the safe side you'd better get your music from the usenet. That way it's legal.
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|Anyone else see the United States of Europe around the corner?
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|Socialist Europe is what I'm seeing the trend towards...
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|Within 2 or 3 decades we could be talking about a federal United States of Europe or some other kind of union thats like that.
As for Socialist Europe, for the most part, we're capitalistic in the EU but with more social protection then what they have in the US.
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|also our laws are more sensible (aleast in some regions), i so hope the US of E will have some kind of reasonable law towards cannabis, like spain or the netherlands.
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|Yes, capitalistic--trending towards socialism though. However barring significant change I can safely say that withen the next 100 years I believe the US will be 'socialist' in the sense of what it was at its birth. We're certainly not going away from socialism. IMO USA has headed towards socialism ever since FDR started "The New Deal". This became much worse IMO when "Government Housing" came along. EU could be faster because over there many folks actually call themselves "socialist" while here we haven't quite reached that point--yet.
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|USA needs law REFORM--there are way too many frikin laws and regulations and rules and exceptions to rules that nobody knows anything anywhere at anytime anymore (purposely redundant sentence). Not gonna happen though...
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|More likely the biblical world nation
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|LOL maybe so...BTW, the sixth letter in the Hebrew alphabet is a 'v' or 'w', and in Hebrew they use letters instead of numbers...so is the Internet going to require you to have a "www" on your forehead or your hand to "buy or sell anything" I wonder?
Just a thought to ponder...
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|"social protection".... you must mean Social Distortion!
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|The problem in The Netherlands is that cannabis is considered as a soft-drug and both hard & soft drugs are still illegal by law.
It isn't legal to sell or buy it! However there is a policy that people can buy it (in small quantities) and to sell it (coffeeshops) or you can grow your own (5 plants which can be confiscated when found but wouldn't get you arrested). The stupid thing is that it isn't legal to grow it in large quantities so coffeeshops still have to obtain it illegaly.
This is partly due to being part of the EU which still condemns the use of cannabis. We're not allowed to make it legal on our own. The French are very strong against it because we would all become hasj smoking hippies. The funny part is that more youths in France (& many other countries) use cannabis than over here in The Netherlands where it's kinda legal.
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|You know that poverty is the cause of many problems in society today. Therefore social-security (if applied the right way) can solve many problems.
The idea, that with capitalism alone people always can make if they want it hard enough, is as out of date as the ideals of communism. The fact that capitalism still survies on its own is due that a majority of people (while deminishing) still enjoy "a good life".
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