MIXCLOUD
In the UK, there has been some progress in the form of the Hargreaves Review, which suggested a digital copyright exchange in the UK, but again, it’s a question of how quickly and effectively it can be implemented. “We’ve been following the Hargreaves review closely,” Perez says. “We submitted evidence to it and now Richard Hooper’s leading the feasibility study, and we submitted evidence to that as well. Just last week I was in parliament, and Professor Hargreaves was there too. We had breakfast and talked about our experiences and I guess that from a sort of top level, everything looks like it’s going in the right direction.
“Te government is pushing for reform and a review of copyright, the question is whether any of this will actually come to fruition ... the number one recommendation that would affect us and everybody else is this idea of a digital copyright exchange, and it’s an idea that I think is very forward thinking and would be incredible, but the actual implementation is going to be challenging. Who builds it? Who runs it? How does it fit into the existing framework? What happens to collecting societies?”
Tese are important questions, not just because of
their specific effects, but because a digital
copyright exchange would send the right signals to digital companies looking to get started in
hadn’t really been done before. So we had to convince them that it was worthwhile to give us that licence.”
“THE IDEA OF A LISTEN AGAIN, ON DEMAND RADIO SHOW HADN’T REALLY BEEN DONE BEFORE. SO WE HAD TO CONVINCE THEM THAT IT WAS WORTHWHILE TO GIVE US THAT LICENCE.”
the UK. While industry and government are certainly developing their attitudes in the right direction, there is still work to be done on the mindsets, on how people in these industries see the business. An example from Mixcloud’s early days makes the point: “When we first approached the PPL, they didn’t have the mandate to license us, so essentially they were saying ‘we quite like what you’re doing, but the record labels who are named shareholders haven’t given us the authority to license what you’re doing, because it doesn’t fit in to a pre-existing category’. And the idea of a listen again, on demand radio show
24 World Intellectual Property Review July/August 2012
With no experience and little expertise, not to mention the lack of funds oſten associated with start-ups (Perez and his co-founders lived in a warehouse for two years, on a pittance while they launched Mixcloud), convincing an entrenched organisation like the PPL was no easy challenge. “It took a long while—probably about nine to 12 months, and it’s only really through working with one of the best rights lawyers here in the UK, a guy called Gregor Pryor at Reed Smith, that we managed to do that,” he says. “It was a lengthy process, at quite significant cost, and that’s very challenging for a young, small business. If people want to see more innovation happening and more businesses building on top of the IP legally, then they have to streamline that.”
Safety first
Going to record labels and telling them that you’ll pay royalties for people streaming music from a website is not the same thing as being able to do it. Given that Mixcloud allows users to upload their own content, recognising everything on the site and dealing with it appropriately is no easy task.
Perez explains that there are two strands to the procedure. “Te first is in terms of identification:
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