Copyright related to the digital environment

By BKM | Berkemeyer

From March 13 to March 17, 2023, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) carried out the Forty-Third Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR).

During the meeting, the Group of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (GRULAC) submitted a proposal for analysis of copyright related to the digital environment.  “GRULAC Member States are convinced that it is possible to build a reciprocal consensus to ensure the formal and material content of authors' and performers' rights, guaranteeing their fair remuneration”, stated the proposal.

According to GRULAC, one of the challenges is that on-demand services, and in particular streaming, are now ubiquitous, taking over, slowly but solidly, larger and larger segments of the broadcasting market causing the making available right combined under the "umbrella solution", to become more akin to the right of communication to the public than to the right of distribution. This created a painful "value gap", the result of which implies that the wealth generated by the consumption of copyrighted content, which is protected by copyright, is diverted and accumulated in favour of technology companies , who claim, that they only "shared their users' content", and allegedly did not make that content available to the public.

“To negotiate with transnational companies and other users of this order, who deliver many millions of individual performances to an audience of millions of people at a time, our authors, featured and non-featured performers, want a legal framework with tools or mechanisms that guarantee their rights, without any discrimination whatsoever, and that allow States to harmonise their own legislation towards progressiveness, which is a characteristic of human intellectual rights," said the GRULAC document. "It is essential to place artists, musicians and singers, rights holders in the musical arts, including traditional arts, on an equal footing and enable in such a way that the rules allow them to negotiate directly even with global DSPs or, where appropriate, to achieve fair remuneration for the use or exploitation of musical performances, remuneration that cannot be abrogated by contracts, considering that there are always, in accordance with the international regime governing the countries of this Worldwide Organisation, minimum standards that private contracts must not fail to observe".

The WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights was set up in the 1998-1999 biennium to examine substantive law topics in the field of copyright and related rights. The Committee includes all member states of WIPO and/or of the Berne Union; and, as observers, certain member states of the United Nations (UN) that are non-members of WIPO and/or the Berne Union, as well as many intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations.