Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

Consent Decrees In The Streaming Era: Digital Withdrawal, Fractional Licensing, And § 114(I), Steven J. Gagliano

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

Clear disagreement exists about how best to reconcile the copyright protections afforded to songwriters with the antitrust considerations protecting consumers. Songwriter public performance royalty collections account for over $2 billion in annual U.S. revenue, roughly 90% of which is collected by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). ASCAP and BMI are performance rights organizations (PROs) regulated by seventy-five-year-old consent decrees. After the Second Circuit determined that these consent decrees prohibit music publishers from selectively withdrawing their new media rights from ASCAP and BMI to directly negotiating with new media services, the PROs …