Studies On The Collective Management Of Copyright In Digital Music Works

The advent of digital technology makes expressions of musical works changed, whichdevelops from the traditional form of tangible carrier to digital music. Digital music worksprimarily disseminates in the form of online play or downloading via the Internet or wirelessnetworks. Millions of sites in the global network disseminate musical works in various fileformats, and increasing number of people enjoy, share, or download music from the internet.Easy copying and dissemination of digital music works makes more widespread infringementact, and the contradiction between the copyright owner and users of musical works becomesmore and more complicated. The characteristics of digital music itself determines thedifficulty of individual management and right protection for the copyright owner. In thiscontext, the collective management of digital music works is of rationality and necessity.However, from the status of China’s legislation and practice, the country’s copyrightcollective management system started late and accumulated less. Unfortunately, MusicCopyright Society of China (MCSC) was founded with facing the conflicts of traditionalmodel and modern changes of the music copyright. China’s "Copyright CollectiveManagement Regulations" failed to address the challenges in brought by digital technology.In the digital environment, there are plenty of confusion in the course of the management ofdigital music works for the copyright collective management organization, that is whendealing with the issues of authorizing manner, collective licensing fees, supervision system ofcollective management organizations and dispute resolution, etc. These specific confusion ispartly caused by the constraints of reality, and another large part by the lack of theoreticalsupport. For these problems, one needs to borrow mature foreign management experience forreference, but we also need to find out a practical way to improve the management systemaccording to our national conditions. Some practical measures can be carried out to improvethe copyright management system with the use of internet technology: to establish anintegrated information management system with online registration platform, musical worksinformation database and information inquiry system; to establish diverse collectivemanagement licensing model; to improve the supervision system of collective management ofmusical works; to establish specialized dispute resolution mechanisms, etc. Through thesemeasures, collective management of music copyright issues emerging from internetenvironment can be effectively dealt with, and a better way can be provide for disseminationof musical works.