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Copyright education should begin with the rights owners, says CMU Business Editor
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 13 October 2014
Hot on the heels of Mike Weatherley MP’s report on copyright education, published on Friday, CMU Business Editor Chris Cooke has penned a paper on the same topic for the latest edition of the CMU Digest Report, which also came out late last week.
In it he welcomes, in particular, Weatherley’s proposal that IP education be added to the school curriculum, though also cites the conclusion of a Great Escape panel on the topic in May 2013 which reckoned that if the music industry wants to educate the masses about the ins and outs at copyright, it should kick things off closer to home.
Writes Cooke: “Getting copyright into the school curriculum should be a top priority for the content industries, and the fact Weatherley’s report also supports this proposal is a very welcome development. Of course, this only goes some way to educating the world at large about copyright, but had the music and wider copyright industries focused their lobbying efforts on this fifteen years ago, then they might now be getting their message out to each new generation of internet users in a more formalised fashion”.
But, he goes on: “Lobbying the Department Of Education will be time consuming, working out where copyright should fit into the curriculum even more so, though better to start that work now than later. But in the meantime there is something else that the music industry could be doing that could achieve much more immediate results, and that is educating its own people”.
“I must declare our bias here – we provide copyright training to the music business – though this was also the conclusion of a panel of educators, managers and publishers debating copyright education at The Great Escape in 2013. How many people working in the music business actually understand what copyright is, why it exists and how it works at a basic level? How many people working in the music rights sector understand copyright? Outside of the legal department, do employees in labels and music publishers really understand how music rights operate?”
Cooke reckons that there is a tendency in many music companies for people to nod a lot when copyright matters come up, but not admit they don’t really understand how copyright works, because no one’s ever explained it to them. “Day to day this ignorance doesn’t matter, because the legal guys look after any deals and contracts where copyright specifics are dealt with. But when an industry is in flux, and when it is having to defend its copyrights, this ignorance becomes a major weakness. After all, how can you expect the world at large to understand and appreciate copyright, if you can’t even teach your own people”.
The latest edition of the CMU Digest Report also considers the implications of the collapse of the Global Repertoire Database project, the one thing Google could do to placate the labels in 2014, and the one thing the labels could do to placate their artists. There’s also an interview with the founder of innovative new ticketing app Dice.fm. You can download the PDF report for £9.99 from the CMU Shop.
CMU Digest subscribers received a link to download their copies in last week’s weekly email bulletin. To receive twelve copies of the Report plus a weekly news digest and other benefits for just £50 a year, become a CMU Digest subscriber by clicking here.
Details of CMU Insights’ bespoke music rights training courses are available here.
