collecting_society

As far as I have wrapped my head around - and to finally start some written specification on it ...

We have 3 different right subjects:

• authorship
• copyright
• performance (= ancillary copyright?)

We have possibly several different right objects:

• music
• lyrics
• cover
• layout
• text (as in liner notes)
• ...

We have the dimensions of

• Identification ("Right holder")
  • all 3 right subjects might be transferable or not, depending on the legal system
  • if transferred, the right is "represented/owned by" or "licensed to" (?) one or more parties (persons or companies, usually collecting societies/labels/producers)
• Accounting (utilization/allocation/distribution)
  • the distribution key is defined by the collecting society, e.g. composition/performance/text (similar to the old impwiki page), which already relate those 3 right subjects
  • depending on the type of utilization, different right holder want to be asked for permission and have a piece of the cake
  • what rights are relevant for distribution? what about e.g. those "flat rates" for publisher?

I might be unsatisfied with the current (theory of) models of those things, because

• The concept of copyright owners as general pointer does not allow to track, why it is a copyright owner (hard to administer later on?)
• We have different ways to express the transfer/representation of rights, e.g.
  • Creation Tariff Category -> Collecting Society
  • Creation Contribution / Performance -> Neighbouring Rights Society
• We have both implicit and explicit definitions of right subjects, e.g.
  • Creation Contribution / Composition -> authorship and Creation Tariff Category -> copyright
  • Creation Contribution / Text -> authorship + copyright
• We have different ways to model right objects, e.g.
  • Creation -> Music (full object)
  • Creation Contribution / Text -> Lyrics (field of "sub" object)
• We might have different kind of objects relevant for distribution (release contribution could be a step towards a more general representation)

Everything might be ok, but there could be also issues with it - I'm just still not confident about it. We really better should talk about that.

For the sake of completeness, it should also be a focus to have a user interface, which is optimized both for

• those, who do "everything" on their own (publisher, label, composer, performer, etc point to one entity)
• those, which need to enter all those complex details separately

Meik Michalke wrote:

rightsowner of the release (https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/85.html)

So - is the rightsowner of the release a right subject of its own or is it sufficient to express it in terms of "copyright for the release" (opposed to copyright for the creations, which is "auto"-owned by the authors and performers in the beginning, but may be transferred then)?

it is not to be confused neither with the authors of the works on the release (composition & lyrics) nor with the performers of the particular interpretation, although the latter usually grant their rights (§77 UrhG, https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/77.html) to the label/publisher for actual production. these rights to the sound recordings are what usually is printed with a "℗" ("P" in circle, for "phonogram") on the cover.

The last part referred back to possible copyright owner for a release? or is this a detail of the transfer of the rights of the performers?

the copyright for lyrics and composition is already defined with the works, it would be redundant to enter that again. they apply automatically to the release as a whole.

You mean for the creation on the release as a whole? or really the release?

As I understand now, copyright owners of releases are about the right to copy and have nothing to do with contributions, so it needs to be an attribute on its own.