Copyright and Music Data in Europe: Transparency as an Imperative to Promote Creators’ Fair Remuneration and Music Diversity

The 19th edition of the Annual European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Conference in Pisa, hosted by the prestigious Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in collaboration with the University of Pisa, brought together over 300 intellectual property experts and enthusiasts from around the world on 11-13 September 2024.

This year, the conference theme was “Intellectual Property and the Future of the Data Economy”. The packed three-day program featured a diverse range of panels, roundtable discussions, and keynotes addressing current issues and topics including artificial intelligence, sustainability, the data economy, and their implications for intellectual property rights and right-holders.

Fair MusE featured prominently in the conference program by hosting a special themed session titled “Copyright and Music Data in Europe: Transparency as an Imperative to Promote Creators’ Fair Remuneration and Music Diversity.” In this setting, researchers from Fair MusE’s Law and Political Sciences Research Hub (Work Package 2) and from its sister project OpenMusE presented their latest research findings. The researchers involved were – for Fair MusE – Prof. Giuseppe Mazziotti, Eirini Volikou, Dr. Apostolos Samaras, and Jasmin Leuendorf; and for OpenMusE, Prof. Martin Senftleben and Dr. Magali Contardi.

Chaired by Professors Giuseppe Mazziotti (Catolica Global School of Law, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon; Fair MusE) and Joost Poort (University of Amsterdam; OpenMusE), our session attracted a curious and engaged audience that filled the entire room. The panel explored critical issues central to Fair MusE’s research activities: from the emergence of ‘fairness’ in the legal and policy discourse spanning three decades in the activities of EU institutions to the issue of how to reconcile data-driven music licensing with the constitutional goal to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity; from complex issues regarding music creators’ right to fair remuneration and to receive information on exploitation to social media services’ copyright liability and its impact on the relationship and bargaining between artists and tech giants who give access to their works. In this regard, the speakers placed special emphasis on the current and future role of collective rights management, music repertoire databases and the consequences of having granted right-holders the freedom to choose how to exercise their rights across EU digital markets.

The current EU legislation does not provide clear answers or tools that creators can unequivocally rely upon to strengthen their rights

The discussion signaled that there is a general expectation of the European music ecosystem to eventually build and rely upon interoperable (if not standardized) music data and metadata infrastructures that can eventually make the legal principle of transparency a more tangible reality for creators, rights managers and music users. As crystallized during the panel, with transparency as a key driver for fairness, this development could help ensure that historically underpaid artists can finally make a sustainable living from their culture-enriching work. In this context, the speakers examined whether and how the current EU legal instruments in copyright law, competition law and platform regulation can effectively improve the current market conditions in terms of transparency, music diversity and fairness. The presentations sparked a lively debate with other conference participants, both during and after the session, especially on how complex costly data and metadata infrastructures should be built. As evidenced by several panel contributions, the current EU legislation does not provide clear answers or tools that creators can unequivocally rely upon to strengthen their rights, showing an excessively optimistic reliance on the potential of industry voluntary standards that are struggling to emerge.

Throughout the conference, further panels and presentations also focused on the pressing issues of transparency and fair remuneration for vulnerable rights-holders in the creative industries, reflecting a growing and welcome interest in these topics within the research community. The insights gathered from these insightful presentations will provide valuable input for us as we continue our work in the coming months.

Overall, the EPIP conference provided an excellent platform to showcase our project and its findings, while engaging in important discussions with leading experts in the field of intellectual property law.