WIPOD – Page Points: Transcript of Episode 11

Intellectual Property and Collective Management

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: So, WIPO can play a very decisive role helping CMOs, collective management organizations, in developing countries. Doing a proper collection and distribution works, because in collective management, there are two sides. There's the money in and the money out. And the money out to rights holders is a very important part of the business.

Otherwise, there's no success in a collective management organization if it doesn't collect and distribute the money properly.

Lise McLeod: The management of copyright and related rights on an individual basis may not always be feasible. For example, a musician cannot contact every single radio station to negotiate licenses and remuneration for the use of each of their songs. On the other hand, it is not practical for a radio station to seek specific permission from every musician for the use of each song.

Collective management organizations enable the clearance of rights for both parties and the economic rewards for right holders.

Hello, Page Points listeners. I'm so pleased to have you join us. Today, I have the honour of welcoming to the podcast, Tarja Koskinen-Olssen, who is the author of the publication entitled Collective Management of Text and Image-Based Works. This is the second edition of an earlier work published in 2005.

Since then, a number of changes have taken place, both in the legislation and practical operations. I would like to say, welcome to the podcast, Tarja.

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: Thank you, Lise. It is a pleasure to join you.

Lise McLeod: How about we begin our conversation by you providing us with a brief description of what is the collective management of copyright? And, have digital formats, their uses, and the way of using those works greatly changed its functioning?

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: Thank you. It's not an easy question, but copyright to start with is an individual right. If you are a creator, or artist, or producer, or publisher, you have a property right in what you have created or invested in.

And in many cases, you can decide yourself how the work is going to be used. In some cases, your works are used in multiple premises all over the world, and it would be practically impossible for you to run after all these cases and ask for permissions and get the money. So, in some cases, it is feasible to bundle all the individual rights into a license of a collective management organization and offer access in an easy way to users. I would say collective management is a mechanism that ensures easy access to copyrighted works for certain groups of users. At the same time, getting some reward for the original authors and publishers.

And coming back to the second part of your question, have the digital age, the digital uses changed the scenario? So the answer is yes and no. It is actually funny to think, or reassuring to think that the basic copyright concepts were drafted and negotiated as early as 1886, and they are still valid in the digital environment.

That is quite amazing, isn't it? So, the first copyright treaty includes something which is called a right of reproduction. And even though you make those copies in many forms, digitally or on paper copies, it's still a copy. So, the original formulation in 1886, that authors have a right to decide how to make reproductions or copies of their works, in any manner or form, it is still very valid today, and collective management is still needed in today's society.

Lise McLeod: The publication states that "press and literature represent the single most important sector in the majority of countries", in a WIPO led study. How is collective management important to publishing as a creative industry?

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: First of all, a few words about the results of the studies that have been made on the basis of a methodology that WIPO has developed. Forty-two countries around the world, post-developed and developing countries, have measured what is the added value of creative industries to the GDP, that is the gross national product of a country, and come to the conclusion that it is, on the average, above 5%, varies from 3 to 10, but on the average 5%.

Of that total amount, press and literature represents close to 40%. So it is the single most important creative industry, alongside with databases. Many times people think about music and films and so on. Still kind of not really thinking that all the newspapers and publications and scientific journals and whatever we read are the majority, even in today's society.

And in certain areas, like I can take as an example, if you are a professor at the university, and you would like to use copyrighted works, publications in your education. Then you would need to ask every single writer and publisher about the permission to do so. And everybody understands that would be close to impossible.

So, the collective management organizations facilitate, make a bridge between the authors and publishers on one side and the users on the other side. And that applies whether the professor takes a paper copy or puts the work into the virtual learning environment, which is quite common in today's society.

Lise McLeod: It is stated that the publication's primary goal is to offer relevant information to policy makers for when they are considering appropriate legislation for copying and communication in society. However, the publication is also practical for IP practitioners and publishers.

Could you please outline what kind of guidance each of these stakeholders will find in the publication? Maybe starting with the policy makers, then the practitioners, and finally the publishers as right holders?

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: Thank you. It's a good question. For policy makers, they are responsible for drafting the laws. And without adequate legislation in each and every country, there's nothing that can be managed, there's no basis for writers and publishers to do what they are doing, writing and publishing. For instance, if I take the print and publishing sector.

So, the policy makers need to make a balance between what is fair and feasible for the users of copyrighted works, and at the same time, guaranteeing some remuneration for rights holders. That is not always an easy task, in particular if you think about educational establishments. But, in that respect, collective management kind of finds a middle way to go.

It bundles the rights and facilitates access to the works by the educational institutions. And at the same time, some guarantee for rights holders to get a remuneration for what they have been doing. So legislation for policy makers is the first goal. And they really have to be careful because if the legislation is unclear, it doesn't serve anybody. It leads to numerous court cases and delays the whole process.

As to then the second group, the practitioners. You may be a lawyer, your advice may be asked by either a user, like a university, and you would need to be capable of giving good advice to the university representatives, how to negotiate with a collective management organization in order to get a good license, which benefits both parties.

You may also advise the collective management organization on how to do their business in tricky negotiations with the users, because users are sometimes very stubborn. They don't believe that a license is really needed. They would rather that they can use the work on the basis of the law. And so your expertise would be needed.

And then the third group you asked about was about the publishers. Publishers are half of the shareholders, I would say, in any literary work. They have the publishing right in that work, whereas the original writer or visual creator owns the second half of the shares. So, if your rights, your individual rights as a publisher are managed by an organization, they are still your rights, and you would like to know what happens to those rights.

When do you get the remuneration you expect? You may be elected to the board of the organization, so you need to know what these organizations do so that you can make the right strategic decisions how to run a collective management organization. That would be, in a nutshell, what I would say.

Lise McLeod: If I were an author, like the writer of a book, would I need to deal with the collective management of copyright, or could I just let my publisher handle it?

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: If you have a literary work, in the form of a book or scientific journal or whatever you have, the original author, the writer, and sometimes even the visual creator, if there are visual elements in the book, have half of the copyright in that work. So even though you conclude a publishing agreement with your publisher, you are still an owner of copyright or co-owner of copyright in that work.

And also your individual rights are managed by the collective management organization. And you would, as much as the publishers, as a writer, you would like to know what happens to your rights? How are they traded on the marketplace? What kind of remuneration would you like to expect? Are your copyrights respected? And how the management goes about?

You may also be elected to the executive body, the board of directors of such an organization. where you represent all the writers in your country. So it would be very important for individual writers to know what happens in the collective management.

Lise McLeod: What role does technology play in managing rights in text and image-based works? And additionally, what role does WIPO play in this?

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: Thank you. First of all, if I start with the technology and also the volume of works that are used all over. And if I take a very practical example of copying in universities, studies have been made in numerous countries, and on the average, every single university student copies around 400 pages of different types of works every year.

That equals to two books and those books include numerous types of works and if you multiply that with the number of all the university students in the world, you know that a lot is copied. And the organizations, the collective management organizations, need to identify every single work that has been copied.

That would not be possible in today's society and with the volumes, without the help of technology. To put it in a simple way, every single work needs an identifier so that the computers understand what work is in question. As a matter of fact, in the field of press and literature, identifiers have been used for a very long time.

Being the first industry to use identifiers, you would probably recognize that the International Standard Book Number, or the ISB Number, is on every book. Now we need to find the equivalents of ISBs to function in the digital environment. But to put it simply, identifiers are needed for all the works and all the rights holders therein.

And to deal with all these identifiers and the data that is being exchanged, you need to have a very efficient IT system. You can't do any collective management in today's society without an effective IT system. IT systems, on the other hand, are mostly very expensive. So not all countries can afford to make a tailor-made system for their use.

For that reason, WIPO has developed already over a long period of time, systems that facilitate the collective management in developing countries, offering certain services, often free of charge, to them. The earlier versions of the WIPO systems have been mainly concentrating on the use of musical works because music is used all over the world in extensive amounts.

The WIPO Connect is the latest version of the WIPO software systems that is offered to collective management organizations, and it is currently being tested for the text and image-based works. It functions in the musical world and is currently being tested for the text and image-based works.

So, WIPO can play a very decisive role helping CMOs, the collective management organizations, in developing countries doing a proper collection and distribution of works. Because in collective management, there are two sides. There's the money in and the money out. And the money out to rights holders is a very important part of the business. Otherwise, there's no success in a collective management organization if it doesn't collect and distribute the money properly. I hope that that's an understandable description of the role of technology.

Lise McLeod: Thank you for that. Our team at the WIPO Knowledge Center assigns the ISBNs and ISSNs, and now we're generating digital object identifiers, or DOIs, to our text and image-based works.

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: Yeah, and if I may add something about the terminology.

People talk a lot about metadata today, and metadata includes all those identifiers and file formats and so on that make the system work in the network environment. And why that is so important is that computers are basically dumb, they only understand numbers because everything in the digital format is in form of zeros and ones.

And in order to know which zero and one is in question, you need an identifier.

Lise McLeod: Absolutely. Are there any last points that you would like to highlight for our listeners directly linked to the publication or otherwise about collective management?

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: First of all, I would like to emphasize the role of the International Federation.

IFRRO, or the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations, is the body that groups together all the collective management organizations in the field of text and image-based works. And currently, as we speak, there are such organizations in 85 countries all over the world, on all continents.

And even though the term collective management organization or CMO is a generic term for these organizations, these organizations usually call themselves as Reproduction Rights Organizations, or RROs. It's still the same, but it is a specific name for the collective management organizations in the text and image-based field.

And IFRRO really brings together all these organizations, offers guidance, also has a code of conduct, how the management business of all these organizations should be done, and offers a lot of help to the organizations. IFRRO is also the international voice of these organizations, speaking, for instance, on behalf of their constituencies at WIPO meetings, when copyright for the future is being discussed.

So IFRRO is the number one, first and foremost, on my mind when I think about additional points. Also, the practical work that these organizations do in their different countries, of course, varies as far as forms and specific points are concerned. But they all do basically the same work. They are a bridge between the users and the rights holders. Or you could call it an intermediary or whatever you would like, but they need to serve because collective management is a service business. So they need to offer good services to rights holders on one hand and the users on the other hand. Otherwise there's no value of the organizations. So it's a very delicate position and this delicate position is also based on the policy makers that we talked about earlier.

They draft reasonable and good and very clear laws so that the work of an organization is possible on the basis of that. So that the rights holders and users don't have to take every little detail to the court in order to clarify what kind of permission is needed. So to conclude with, I think that the service aspect of this collective management business is an important one. They need to bring a win- win solution to both constituencies, to rights holders and users.

Lise McLeod: Thank you, Tarja. I think these last comments really help close the loop in explaining and fleshing out the importance of the entire system of the CMOs and that of IFRRO, which supports the whole structure. I'd like to thank you for joining us and for highlighting this new publication to our Page Points listeners.

Tarja Koskinen-Olssen: A pleasure. Nice to be with you.

Lise McLeod: I hope that you enjoyed our conversation about collective management, its technology, and the organizations that enable its workings. Tarja's publication can be found on our WIPO website and in our Knowledge Repository.

Until next time, and the next Page Points, bye for now!