Shaping the Conversation: Fair MusE’s October 2025 Contributions Across Europe
October 2025 was a significant month for Fair MusE’s engagement with the international copyright and cultural policy community
The project shared its findings at three major events across Europe, each addressing essential aspects of music rights governance, from collective management and rights transfers to platform liability and the evolving digital environment. These contributions allowed Fair MusE to connect its research with ongoing global conversations and deepen collaborations with leading institutions in the field.
The following overview traces this progression from Istanbul to Opatija and Dublin, showing how each event added a distinct perspective to the project’s exploration of fairness in the music ecosystem.
Istanbul — Collective Management and Rights Governance
Fair MusE’s October activities opened in Turkey at the symposium “Yaratımdan Yoruma: Türkiye’de Müziğin Toplu Hak Yönetimi ve Gelecek Perspektifi,” organised by copyright collective organisation MÜYORBİR and FİSAUM on the occasion of MÜYORBİR’s 25th anniversary and the centenary of Ankara University’s Law Faculty.
Prof. Giuseppe Mazziotti, Principal Investigator and Coordinator of the Fair MusE project, contributed to the first session via an online intervention, presenting insights from Fair MusE’s work on metadata governance, platforms’ reporting obligations, and remuneration practices in digital music markets. While more regionally oriented than the subsequent engagements, the symposium offered a very useful opportunity to reflect on how national collective management frameworks are adapting to changes brought by digitisation.
A short video excerpt from Prof. Mazziotti’s intervention is available below:
Opatija — Streaming, Rights Transfers, and Large Catalogues
Fair MusE then travelled to Croatia for the ALAI International Congress 2025, one of the world’s most respected academic and policy forums dedicated to the study of authors’ rights. This year’s theme “140 Years Later – Looking Ahead: Whose Right is Copyright?” entailed a broad collective review of authors’ and neighbouring rights’ principles at a time of rapid technological transformation, and in light of different responses being provided by policymakers around the world.
Photos by Damil Kalogjera
In the session on “Streaming, transfer of rights, and the management of large catalogues,” Prof. Mazziotti served as Rapporteur, presenting comparative insights from more than twenty national reports across different jurisdictions. The discussion explored contractual practices, catalogue concentration, rights transferability regimes, and their implications for creators’ bargaining power in streaming markets—topics closely aligned with Fair MusE’s analyses of market structure and rights allocation.
Photos by Damil Kalogjera
A brief excerpt from Giuseppe Mazziotti’s rapporteur presentation is included below:
Dublin — Article 17, Platform Liability, and the Value Gap
The month concluded in Ireland at the Copyright Society’s 2025 International Conference, a major transatlantic forum bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and representatives of the US Copyright Office.
During the panel “Article 17: Has the ‘Value Gap’ Closed? Or the Internet Killed Off?”, Prof. Mazziotti joined European and American experts to assess the effectiveness of Article 17 of the DSM Directive six years after its adoption. The session addressed implementation challenges across Member States, the role of automated content recognition systems, the interface between users’ rights and licensing obligations, and the broader implications for platform responsibility. These discussions directly resonated with Fair MusE’s research on digital intermediaries and the distribution of value within streaming ecosystems.
A Strengthened Presence in International Copyright Debates
Across the three events, Fair MusE engaged with diverse communities working at the intersection of copyright law, authors’ long-term and new rights, cultural policy, and digital market governance. The project’s contributions highlighted ongoing research on metadata accuracy, rights transfer mechanisms, and fair remuneration; all central issues to understanding how today’s music ecosystem operates.
As the project approaches its conclusion, visibility in recognised international venues plays a crucial role in amplifying Fair MusE’s contribution to contemporary copyright and cultural policy debates. The exchanges in Istanbul, Opatija, and Dublin reinforce the project’s position as a credible source of analysis on the functioning of digital music ecosystems.
