calling the five-year anniversary of the Music Modernization Act a “key moment to course-correct” in a blog post about the Mechanical Licensing Collective. In the process, he suggested the organization has “gone beyond its remit” in collecting and administering the blanket mechanical license in the United States.
“Reasonable costs of the collective cannot include everything from traveling to distant countries to conduct outreach to songwriters far beyond the U.S. licensing system,” writes Davies. The DiMA CEO/president, who assumed the role in January of this year, also points out that the MLC is “suing one of the licensees that pays its costs — using licensee money to pursue its allegations against a licensee on a novel legal theory.
Since 2018, the MLC has done a great job building a rights organization that today represents thousands of rightsholders, administers over fifty blanket licenses and has distributed over $1.5 billion inUnder the MMA, the Copyright Office reviews every five years its initial designation of the MLC, with the first review starting this past January.
The central compromise of the MMA was the creation of a new mechanical licensing collective to administer Section 115 streaming blanket licenses, governed by rightsholders, and funded by DSPs.
Thankfully, the music publishers and songwriters that supported and created the MLC understood—and convinced the DSPs at that time—that to develop a collective that fulfilled the mandate of the MMA and addressed the significant issues of the past, the MLC needed reasonable funding equal to its broad statutory responsibilities.
When they speak of “neutrality,” what they want is to “neuter” the ability of the MLC to accomplish the clear responsibilities set out for it in the MMA. Those responsibilities include being an effective administrator of the compulsory license, being a diligent enforcer of DSP reporting and royalty obligations, and being a strong defender of the rights that the MLC is charged with licensing on behalf of music publishers and songwriters.