In this panel held at a 2007 meeting of the American Bar Association, panelists Gary R. Greenstein, Jacqueline C. Charlesworth, Lee Knife, Richard Owens, Victoria Bassetti discuss the state of the digital music marketplace today from numerous points of view – licensing bodies, record companies, regulatory agencies, and artist advocates, and assess whether and how the current regulatory climate accurately and fairly reflects the best interests of all participants. Among the topics discussed are: today’s digital marketplace and the globalization of music distribution; the recent and ongoing debates over proper performance royalty rates for music played on webcasts; whether there exists a model that could scale efficiently to handle licensing issues on a global basis, and what kind of regulatory models are most likely to both foster the creation of music and encourage consumers of music to seek out new artists and songs via digital outlets.

Richard Owens of WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) explains what his organization is and what their areas of responsibility are in regard to enforcing intellectual property law on an international scale, discusses why intellectual property law is now more than ever a growing field, and shares advice for young lawyers and law students on how to start a career in the field.

In this clip from a panel held at a 2007 meeting of the American Bar Association on “The Digital Music Industry – Where Are We? How Did We Get Here? Where Are Things Going?,” the panelists debate the state of the digital music marketplace today – the difficulties that are holding up development of a more robust digital market, what could be done to improve market efficiency, and the legal ramifications of any such changes. In particular, they discuss various sides of the problems introduced into the licensing process when a global digital marketplace tries to interact with the hundreds of local licensing schemes and interpretations of rights that exist for the content being sold, and explain the problems that rights administrators face when trying to apply decades-old regulations to brand-new situations.

Richard Owens of WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) discusses why intellectual property law is now more than ever a growing field, and shares advice for young lawyers and law students on how to start a career in the field.

In this clip from a panel held at a 2007 meeting of the American Bar Association on “The Digital Music Industry – Where Are We? How Did We Get Here? Where Are Things Going?,” the panelists discuss the challenges that licensing bodies face when attempting to allow global distribution of music, when licenses for broadcast are secured on a country-by-country basis. They also discuss how content providers must approach global clearance of rights today (by retaining counsel in every country you broadcast in), how the tasks of clearing content for global use might be made easier in the future, and whether digital rights management is a viable method for tracking rights on a song-by-song basis.