Canadian Copyright Panel Sets Music Royalties
The Copyright Board of Canada last week issued a decision setting Internet music royalties retroactively for a 10-year period, beginning in 1996 and the board will review rates going forward from 2007 in the near future, officials said. The ruling came as a result of the second part of a proceeding involving the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada. The first decision was issued in October 2007 and dealt exclusively with online music services.
The rate for commercial radio stations' Web sites is set at 1.5 percent of Internet-related revenues for low music use stations and at 4.2 percent for the others. A rate of 1.9 percent of Internet operating costs will apply to non-commercial radio stations, a rate these stations already pay for their conventional operations. Additionally, in recognition that not all pages of a radio station’s site contain sounds, rates will apply to no more than half of a site’s ad revenue or operating costs. Users will be allowed to further reduce the proportion in the event that less than 50 percent of a site’s pages contain sound.
The panel decided not to impose a tariff on a number of disparate sites for which the main activity is not related to music. Those include, for instance, restaurants, hotels, bars and any other business sites that use music. It also includes amateur podcasts, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and video sharing sites such as YouTube, as well as sites operated by individuals who use music. Such a tariff, if certified, could potentially target hundreds of thousands of users who either make very limited use of music or attract little or no attention, officials said.
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