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This page: Legislation
Legislation
'Digital distribution is where music is headed. This raises many issues regarding retention and value of your rights.
Now that you have a basic understanding of some of the principles and terminology involved in music rights, it's in your interest to take a look at these examples of proposed or existing legislation that might affect your work as a musician:
The Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995. In the copyright section of this column, I listed the rights that are exclusive to copyright owners. This law grants owners of sound recordings (in most instances the record label) the right to perform their works publicly by means of certain digital audio transmissions. This means that the copyright owner of a sound recording can collect performance royalties for digital transmissions of that work, similar to the performance royalties that owners of compositions collect through ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC in the U.S.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is a forum of major record labels and other groups dedicated to protecting copyright interests in music that is distributed digitally. Their ambition is to keep music from being freely distributed by developing a standard set of specifications with which to encode or encrypt music files. So far, however, they haven't succeeded in coming up with such specs.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) amended the Copyright Act by adding several new provisions, including a section relating to "webcasting" activities. We will get deeper into the implications of the DMCA later.
Perhaps this introduction has answered some of your questions; more likely, it's raised a few new ones as well. We'll deal with all of them, and much more, in the months to come.
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