Collecting Societies

This presentation will explore the evolving relationship between Collecting Societies and individual rights management practices as expressed through the use of Creative Commons licenses by musicians and other free culture practitioners. The past three years have seen intensive interactions between Collecting Societies and Creative Commons and over the last year we have seen the emergence of experiments that explore the potential of combining collective rights management and individual rights management.

I will reflect on the history and role of collecting societies, the challenges posed by Creative Commons and other individual rights management practices to the status quo and the models that seek to combine the two.

There are currently two different approaches of combining (NC) CC licensing with collective rights management. In the Netherlands (highly regulated and restrictive) and Denmark (more or less a laisser faire approach). the presentation will describe these approaches and the processes that have lead to them coming into being and explore future scenarios.