This post first appeared on Artist Rights Watch.

[Editor Charlie sez: The U.S. Copyright Office is proposing many different ways to regulate The MLC, which is the government approved mechanical licensing collective under MMA authorized to collect and pay out “all streaming mechanicals for every song ever written or that ever may be written by any songwriter in the world that is exploited in the United States under the blanket license.”  The Copyright Office is submitting these regulations to the public to comment on.  The way it works is that the Copyright Office publishes a notice on the copyright.gov website that describes the rule they propose making and then they ask for public comments on that proposed rule.  They then redraft that proposed rule into a final rule and tell you if they took your comments into account. They do read them all!

The Copyright Office has a boatload of new rules to make in order to regulate The MLC.  (That’s not a typo by the way, the MLC styles itself as The MLC.)  The comments are starting to be posted by the Copyright Office on the Regulations.gov website.  “Comments” in this world are just your suggestions to the Copyright Office about how to make the rule better.  We’re going to post a selection of the more interesting comments.

There is still an opportunity to comment on how the Copyright Office is to regulate The MLC’s handling of the “black box” or the “unclaimed” revenue.  You can read about it here and also the description of the Copyright Office Unclaimed Royalties Study here.  It’s a great thing that the Copyright Office is doing about the black box, but they need your participation!

This comment from Music Reports gives some interesting insights into how The MLC is favoring the NMPA’s formerly wholly-owned Harry Fox Agency (HFA) which has been on the wrong side of most of the licensing debacles.  Chris posted some analysis on MediaNet’s comment about criticisms of the HFA-The MLC contract as well as its rather odd timeline as revealed at The Copyright Office roundtables on the next cluster jam, the unclaimed royalties.  At least that has the entertainment value of watching them steal in plain site with the Copyright Office drinking game of who will make the excuses for them this time like we don’t notice.  We’re not big MRI fans (or MediaNet fans for that matter), but when they’re right, they’re right.

The sad truth is that this entire MLC exercise has become about the rich getting richer from a data land grab for independent songwriters and publishers who have been duped into thinking it’s all for their benefit.  It was all so predictable, but nobody listened.  This is what they wanted, and now they’ve got it.  How about a rule that says if you had your fingerprints on any part of the debacle of the last 20 years, you are immediately disqualified?  Bye bye HFA, NMPA, MRI, MediaNet.  Unfortunately that is not and never will be the rule because these are the same people who make the rules and are the same people who gave songwriters frozen mechanicals from 1909-1978 and are still freezing the 9.1¢ statutory royalty for fourteen years.

MRI could have done with some editing, but stick with it, they make a lot of sense.]

Read Music Reports entire comment here.

Music Reports generally agrees with, endorses, and echoes the views of MediaNet as stated in the response to the NOI it filed today.

Music Reports also takes note of the MLC’s selection of HFA as a major provider of the capabilities required for its core operations. While the MLC is narrowly limited by the MMA to the principal purpose of administering the blanket license for Section 115-compliant audio-only streaming music services in the United States, and specifically prohibited from storing data about or administering public performance licenses, HFA/SESAC is not so constrained.

On the contrary, HFA/SESAC is free, as a non-regulated, for profit commercial music rights administration service, to administer any type of mechanical licenses. Moreover, SESAC, administers performance rights on a for-profit basis in competition with other PROs. Being hired by the MLC does not change the fact that HFA/SESAC is in competition with other commercial music rights administration services that are not the beneficiaries of a long term, highly-paid contract with the MLC. This is fair enough, so far is it goes.

But as noted above, the boundaries between HFA/SESAC’s database and that which the MLC must build and make publicly available are completely unknown [want to bet that’s because they don’t exist?], as is the timeframe during which the former will substitute for the latter, and whether a proprietary MLC database built independently of HFA’s data will ever be the basis on which the MLC renders royalty distributions.

What is known, however, is that the MLC will enjoy publicity generated by its own statutory mandates (subsidized by the DLC), by the DLC itself, and by the Office, all of whom are authorized and required to devote budgetary allocations to direct publishers’ attention to registering their rights data with the MLC (the database of which is, for the foreseeable future, that of HFA/SESAC). Notwithstanding that the primary purpose of these provisions may be to publicize the existence of the database and of available unclaimed royalties, the consequence will be the direction of resources toward the focus of copyright owners’ attention on just one of several important, pre-existing music rights registries. This is in effect a set of reinforcing government subsidies of which one private enterprise, in competition with other marketplace actors, is the beneficiary.

To the extent HFA/SESAC directly benefits unfairly from a privileged place in the data ecosystem by virtue of this arrangement, the goal of the MMA to create a healthier music rights administration ecosystem will be perversely harmed by the creation of an uneven playing field that penalizes the investments in data made by other services. To be sure, other commercial services are free to compete with HFA to offer services to the MLC and others in the marketplace. But over time, a privileged place in the market’s information flow may distort competition to the determent of copyright owners and their administrators, DMPs, and the public.

Luckily, the Office can prevent this result quite simply by requiring that the MLC provide access to its public database on a competition-neutral basis.

As was noted above, there is an important temporal aspect to the management of music rights data. In order for two administrators to efficiently interoperate, they must be able to have a more or less shared contemporary view of the data about the works they are administering, even if they don’t always agree on every detail.

Therefore, the specific prescription called for here is a combination of the points made in the previous sections above: (a) the Office should use its authority under the MMA to adopt such regulations as it deems necessary to clarify that the public database which the MLC must establish and maintain will be identical to or at least contain the same data as the database on which the MLC will distribute royalties; (b) the MLC should make its public database available contemporaneously with the commencement of its royalty distribution efforts; and (c) the MLC must offer eligible parties bulk, machine-readable access to such data “on a basis that is both comprehensive and as frequent as necessary to efficiently manage the licensing and royalty distribution activities of the mechanical licensing collective itself, and not less than daily access to changed information within a day of any change to such information.”