EU to Music Industry: Get Your Act Together
When we talk about an online music or video service, almost inevitably we’re talking about the US version of it, because – due to copyright issues – the service (or at least some of its content, as is the case with YouTube) doesn’t work in the bigger part of the world. The usual explanation I hear is “it’s due to copyright laws,” but the entertainment industry has, in fact, the power to change things; they’re just slow and reluctant to do so. The biggest problem is the fact that music rights are sold separately in each European country, and collecting societies – various groups which collect copyright-related fees and give them to the artists – have different contracts that allow artists to collect payments only from an agency based in their country. This is what’s stopping Apple from offering iTunes in some European countries; if they were able to set up a single store for all of Europe, it’d be much easier.
Read the whole article on Mashable
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