William Nix Panelist in Copyright Office “Unclaimed Royalties Study” Kickoff Symposium
William Nix (Creative Projects Group) was a panelist in the March 26th U.S. Copyright Office "Unclaimed Royalties" event. Our Roundtable will focus on "Holding & Distribution." The other panelists were: Steven Ambers (SOCAN); Rick Carnes (SGA); Daniel Findikian (Qobuz); Ali Lieberman (SoundExchange); Iain Morris (Pandora); Sam Sokol (Artist Rights Alliance); Shannon Sorensen (NMPA); and Erika Nuri Taylor (The MLC – UROC).
Unclaimed Royalties Study
As directed by the Music Modernization Act (MMA), the U.S. Copyright Office is undertaking a public study, in consultation with the Government Accountability Office, to recommend best practices that the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) may implement to effectively identify and locate copyright owners with unclaimed royalties of musical works, encourage copyright owners to claim accrued royalties, and ultimately reduce the incidence of unclaimed royalties.
On June 2, 2020, the Office issued a Federal Register notice soliciting public comments for this study. Public comments were due August 3, 2020, and reply comments were due August 31, 2020. Due to the high volume of requests to participate, the Office will hold public roundtables as part of its study on March 25, 2021, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. eastern time, and on March 26, 2021, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. eastern time, via Zoom. A few days before the first day of roundtables, the Office will make a Zoom link available on this page so that members of the public may observe the roundtable sessions. For those wishing to provide testimony in the Audience Participation portion of the event, a sign-up form for Audience Participation will be available on this page starting March 22, 2021.
For further information see: : https://www.copyright.gov/policy/unclaimed-royalties/, https://www.copyright.gov/policy/unclaimed-royalties/cmo-report and https://www.copyright.gov/policy/unclaimed-royalties/cmo-full-report.pdf
February 8, 2021 - Notice of Public Roundtables
Roundtable Transcript - March 25, 2021
Roundtable Transcript - March 26, 2021
The following materials have been received from roundtable participants who wished to share additional information during the event, but were unable to do so: CrossBorderWorks