I know the people who were involved. I know that they were not exactly on the top of their game but they were there. They didn’t know what was going to happen, but they did what they thought was right.
We are very aware here at GOG.com of this issue. So we have a policy of not talking about the situation at all with any company that has a relationship with us.
The Global Music Rights Initiative is an international organization that works to promote global music ownership worldwide. Its members include music companies, the recording industry, and governments. Global Music Rights works to create new methods of copyright enforcement that work to achieve the ends of global music ownership. In other words, it aims to build a global economy where music is owned and sold as a public good. It has been around for many years, but now it is branching out to include artists in the scheme of things.
Global Music Rights, or GMR, is a relatively new organization. It was originally created by Sony Music Entertainment in 1992, when they tried to sue music publishers into giving up their control over the music we listen to around the world. Since then, as the music industries have realized that there are many other ways to profit from music than just selling music on a wholesale basis, they have begun to create new mechanisms for enforcing ownership of music.
GMR has already been a success for many of the major music companies. For example, Sony Music Entertainment has used it to negotiate a deal with the BBC, which gives them ownership of the copyright for the BBC’s radio stations. This has led to a number of companies like Astralwerks, which makes computer programs that allow corporations to “own” copyrighted music, and Universal Music Group, who use GMR to gain rights to copyrights from other companies.
The problem is that these companies don’t really have any real leverage. They are not parties to the agreements that corporations like Universal Music Group and Astralwerks use to gain rights to music. So while they may be making millions of dollars from the music they’re selling, they have very little in the way of real power.
What’s worse is that the music industry has been very slow to step up to the plate to take advantage of the new technologies like streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, or even the likes of Deezer or TIDAL. It’s also not clear if these companies would be willing to step up to the plate if they knew they were in danger of losing their music ownership in the future.
With music rights, the rights holder is the one that has to make a deal with a third party, like an artist to get the rights to that piece of music. This usually takes the form of a royalty check or a “license” (sometimes spelled “license”) which gives the music company the right to use the music. This is how the artists make a lot of the money for them, and they don’t always get a cut of the profits.
In the case of global music rights, music companies like Universal are basically saying that if you don’t pay up, the music company is going to stop making music that’s in your likeness. If you’re a major artist you might have a contract with a record company that allows you to sell all your music worldwide. This would mean that no matter what, you’re out of music royalties for a certain amount of time.
This problem is a bit harder to fix if you’re not a major artist, which is why labels like Universal are pushing for a new global music deal that would make it possible to sell music worldwide without having to pay any royalties at all. I think this issue is particularly thorny over the fact that it’s often hard to get the rights to your music in the first place, so if you can’t have a deal with a label, then you’re out of luck.
