FACILITATING THE DEVELOPMENT
  
   OF THE ONLINE LICENSING ENVIRONMENT
  
          FOR COPYRIGHTED WORKS
  
              OPEN MEETING
  
        WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2015

    U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
  GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ACADEMY
   MADISON BUILDING EAST, SECOND LEVEL
            600 DULANY STREET
    ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA  22313-1450

  
  
                           I N D E X
                                                         PAGE
  Welcoming Remarks                                        3
  
  Standard Identifiers:  An Overview of the Current
  Landscape                                                9
  
  The Challenges:  Gaps in Coverage and Areas for
  Improvement                                             31
  
  The Path Forward:  Interoperability of Standard
  Identifiers and Incorporation into Databases of
  Rights Information                                      76
  
       The Music Sector                                   90
       Other Sectors                                     122
  
  UK Copyright Hub:  One Model of Public/Private
  Cooperation                                            154
  
  Toward a US Copyright Hub?                             193

  
  
                       WELCOMING REMARKS
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Good morning, everyone.  We’re
  going to get started.  Thanks.
            So, good morning.  Let me start by introducing
  myself.  I’m Shira Perlmutter, the Chief Policy Officer
  here at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and I wanted
  to welcome all of you to this meeting, where we are going
  to be exploring whether and how the government can
  facilitate the further development of the online licensing
  environment for copyrighted works.  So, I’m very pleased
  to see all of you here today, and also I know that there
  are many people joining by webcast, so I welcome them,
  too.
            So, as most of you know, this meeting is part of
  a process that was started by the Internet Policy Task
  Force of the Department of Commerce through its 2013 Green
  Paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity and Innovation in
  the Digital Economy.  And in the Green Paper, we
  identified several issues on which the Task Force would
  undertake further work.  Some of you have been involved in
  some of those other projects, but one of them was
  examining whether there is an appropriate role for the
  government in helping to improve the online licensing
  environment.
            So, we’ve received already written comments from
  a range of stakeholders on these topics.  We had two
  panels that addressed these issues at our first public
  meeting in December of 2013, and then based on what we
  heard through all of these sources, we’ve narrowed the
  issues to a few topics that seem to merit further
  discussion, and that’s what today is devoted to doing.
            We described in the Green Paper the dynamic and
  fast-growing online marketplace that’s evolved over the
  past few years, and, of course, even more so since the
  paper was written, but at the same time, we did hear from
  many commenters that there certainly was still room for
  improvement.  And, in particular, they pointed to a need
  for more comprehensive and reliable ownership data, for
  interoperable standards that enable communications among
  and between databases, and more streamlined online
  licensing mechanisms.
            And, of course, the ultimate goal is a world
  where anyone who wishes to use works online is able to
  locate the owners of the rights and obtain licenses easily
  and smoothly, including for low-value transactions, not
  just commercially important transactions.
            Many of the public comments we received did
  stress the point, which we also had made in the Green
  Paper, that building the online marketplace is
  fundamentally a function of the private sector and
  government should not be overly involved, but some also
  suggested that the government could play a useful role in
  some respects.
            Now, of course, the Copyright Office is
  undertaking considerable work in this area as it expands
  and updates its public databases, and it’s looking at
  incorporating the use of standard identifiers in that
  context.  There are a number of possible additional
  government roles that we identified in our notice of this
  meeting: what about promoting greater use of standard
  identifiers in all sectors, as well as interoperability
  among them; encouraging the creation of a standardized
  framework for APIs that could facilitate automatic access
  to information; working with other countries to prioritize
  the use of identifiers or standards, so an international
  aspect; participating in the development of international
  licensing projects; facilitating the creation of or
  participation in a copyright hub as in the UK project that
  we’ll be discussing later today; and, of course, more
  generally a role that the government often plays, which is
  just convening stakeholders to take forward these or any
  related initiatives.
            So, we’re throwing these ideas out on the table. 
  We’re far from wedded or sure about any of them, but we
  would like to hear today from you whether any of these
  efforts might be useful or if there’s other activities
  that should be considered.
            So, we’re delighted that we were able to pull
  together a group of such distinguished experts.  We have
  many of the leading actors and thinkers in this field, and
  we expect to have a very stimulating and hopefully very
  interactive debate with our panelists.
            So, we’ll begin today with a presentation by
  Mark Bide that provides an overview of the current
  landscape of standard identifiers -- what’s out there
  today.  And, hopefully, that will set the stage for the
  rest of the discussion.
            We’ll then move to our first panel, where we
  have experts from a variety of different sectors that will
  talk about the current use of identifiers in their
  particular sector, the challenges that they face, and
  whatever hurdles there are that need to be overcome to
  create a fully efficient marketplace.
            We’ll then have a coffee break and talk about
  possible solutions, so, in particular, in what ways can
  interoperability of identifiers and their incorporation
  into databases of rights information resolve some of the
  problems that will have been raised in the earlier panel
  discussion.
            And we’re going to break the discussion into two
  parts.  The first will deal with music because there’s an
  awful lot happening in the music space, and there’s plenty
  to merit a full panel discussion there.  We’re lucky to
  have Jacqueline Charlesworth, the General Counsel of the
  Copyright Office, who will join us to discuss -- to
  describe the recommendations that deal with the issue of
  identifiers in the Copyright Office’s recent report on
  Copyright and the Music Marketplace.
            And we’ll then have a panel to discuss that
  report and any other thoughts or recommendations in the
  music field.  The second panel will have representatives
  from other sectors talking about how similar approaches in
  their own areas might help to facilitate the licensing
  environment.
            We’ll then have a lunch break, and I think we
  have a list of restaurants that we’ve passed out.  We also
  have a cafeteria here if anyone wants to stay in-house.
            And in the afternoon, we’ll have Dominic Young
  and Caroline Boyd from the UK Copyright Hub explaining
  exactly what the project is.  Everyone’s heard about it,
  but we may not know all the details or understand the
  latest of what has been accomplished.  They’ll talk about
  how the Hub has been set up, what it’s doing, and what it
  hopes to achieve in the future.
            We’ll then have one last panel with a range of
  stakeholders to give their views on whether a similar
  project would be desirable in this country or whether the
  Copyright Hub in the UK can appropriately be extended to
  incorporate US works and rights perhaps further than it
  has so far.
            And then we’ve allowed a half-hour of discussion
  time to open that up to the audience and to our web
  viewers.
            So, let’s begin.  I very much look forward to
  learning a lot from today’s conversation and imagine that
  it will help the task force as we consider all these
  issues going forward.
            So, let me turn it over to Ann now, who will say
  a few words about logistics and introduce the first
  speaker.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you, everybody, and
  welcome online people.  If any of the audience -- either
  in-person audience or online audience -- has comments or
  questions, there’s going to be time to raise them
  immediately after each discussion.  For those here,
  there’s a microphone right there that you should go to. 
  For those watching the webcast, please call.
            I’m going to give you a phone number now, so get
  out your pens:  (888)453-9955 for our phone bridge.  Your
  pass code is -- so you need pens again -- 3477197.  If you
  didn’t get this down, though, the number is posted on our
  website, so you can find it there.  You will need to press
  star-one for the operator, and after the operator
  announces you, you’ll be able to provide your comments or
  questions to the panel.
            So, now it is my pleasure to introduce Mark
  Bide, who is joining us from across the sea.  He is an
  expert in the identifier area.  He’s been working in it
  for a long time, and he will share that with you.  He is
  also a strategic advisor to the Copyright Hub that you
  will be hearing about this afternoon.
            So, without further ado, thank you.
                     STANDARD IDENTIFIERS:
             AN OVERVIEW OF THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
            MR. BIDE:  Thank you, Ann, and good morning.  I
  think that maybe I need to give a few words of explanation
  of why I’m speaking here today, not least because really
  I’m here in a personal capacity rather than speaking on
  behalf of the Hub.  And I’m very honored to have been
  invited, particularly since there are a number of people
  in this audience who could give this presentation just as
  well as I could.
            I guess I’ve been asked because I’ve been
  concerned about the pursuit of more efficient copyright
  licensing for the better part of two decades and because
  identification standards go to the heart of this.  I’ve
  also been involved in identifiers since the mid 1990s.  I
  was part of the team that delivered the index project.  I
  was involved in the project that ultimately became DDEX. 
  I’ve run a global trade standards organization in the
  publishing industry, and in that role had responsibility
  for an international identifier agency for an ISO
  identifier.  I was the original designer of the Linked
  Content Coalition Project; was responsible for
  establishing the organization’s governance model.
            I’m now Chairman of the Publishers Licensing
  Society and Joint Chair of the Copyright Licensing Agency. 
  And with the authors, we’re the closest equivalent in the
  UK to the Copyright Clearance Center here in the US.  And
  as Ann said, I’m a strategic consultant to the Copyright
  Hub.  So, this talk is really about much of my
  professional life of the last 20 years.
            So, the first question is why do we always start
  conversations about improving the management of media
  online and particularly about licensing with the
  presentation about identifiers.  Let’s begin at the
  beginning.  What is an identifier?  What is a standard? 
  And why are they important?
            The first of these is an easy question to
  answer.  An identifier is simply a name to call something
  by.  But in the context of what we’re talking about today,
  the way we understand what an identifier is goes far
  beyond simply saying it’s a name.  By an identifier, we
  mean a name that is suitable for machine-to-machine
  communication, and that means it has to have certain
  characteristics.  The most important of these is it should
  be unique in its own context and its own domain.  In other
  words, an identifier should uniquely identify only one
  thing, because machines don’t manage ambiguity very well.
            For the time being at least, people are better
  at inference than are machines, and in inference, context
  is everything.  People can guess at the context; machines
  have to work without guessing.
            Identifiers help machines to understand whether
  two things are the same thing or two different things, or
  to use the slightly more technical language we sometimes
  favor, to collocate and to disambiguate.  So, identifiers
  are powerful tools in the process of machine-to-machine
  communication, and if we’re to enable people to manage
  rights and licensing online using automated or semi-
  automated processes, we have to be certain about
  identification.  Are we all talking about the same thing?
            But what do I mean when I say are the two things
  the same?  That’s a question as old as philosophy.  Think
  of a Theseus paradox, a conundrum also sometimes known as
  “my grandfather’s ax.”  If every part of something has
  been replaced, how can it possibly be the same thing?  And
  yet we continue to call it by the same name.
            Or here’s an example closer to home.  Consider
  the case of these two books, clearly distinct and
  different objects, and yet from the point of view of an
  ISBN, the most venerable of all ISO identification
  standards, they’re indeed the same thing.  But if one of
  these things is a hardback and one a paperback, they have
  different ISBNs, they’re different things.  And this is
  exposing the context in which the ISBN functions as an
  identifier.  It identifies distinct products, items of
  trade that need to be distinguished from one another in
  the book supply chain.
            ISBNs have been doing this for nearly 50 years. 
  Before that, books had to be ordered from their publishers
  using proprietary catalog numbers.  Automation was more or
  less impossible.  The introduction of the ISBN allowed the
  development of automated systems for the management of the
  book supply chain, for ordering, for invoicing, for the
  myriad communications that need to take place to
  facilitate an orderly marketplace.  Before they had them,
  no one knew they needed them.  Now ISBNs are used to
  identify books in book supply chains all over the world.
            That doesn’t mean you can’t use another
  identifier instead, and some organizations do use
  proprietary identifiers within their own systems.  But to
  deploy one on the same scale as the ISBN, you’d have to
  reinvent the ISBN, an expensive exercise in futility.
            However, the challenges of identification in
  books are as nothing in comparison to the challenges of
  identification in more complex media like music or
  audiovisual.  So, here’s something for you all to think
  about as you doze off in the rest of my presentation:  To
  what extent are two sets of recordings of Beethoven’s Nine
  Symphonies the same thing and to what extent are they
  different things?  In what contexts?
            This key issue, deciding when two things are the
  same and when they’re different, we call granularity, the
  extent to which we have to divide the world we’re
  describing into the individual elements that need
  identification.  The answer to the question the same or
  different in any computer system and in talking about
  identifiers, we’re always talking about computer systems,
  is the granularity must follow the functional requirement
  that the identifier has been designed to fulfill.  Of
  course, all computer systems have inbuilt identification
  systems.  They couldn’t operate without them.
            Systems allocate database keys automatically to
  each record created in the system, so what’s the
  difference between the database key and an identifier?  At
  its simplest, this is a matter of scope.  Within any
  single system, there is no need for a database key to be
  given any context.  The context is the system in which it
  is used.  Even within an organization, that context can
  simply be assumed, although this is often itself a cause
  of considerable problems in large and distributed
  organizations.  Move beyond the boundary of a single
  organization, become a public identifier, and context is
  everything.  And that is where standards become critical.
            In a complex automated transaction environment,
  different people and organizations must have confidence
  that their individual systems are talking about the same
  thing if they’re to have an appropriate level of trust in
  the transactions themselves.
            So, we need some sort of process through which
  the meaning and use of a shared identifier can be defined. 
  Sometimes, this can simply be defined between trading
  partners in a more or less informal way, but as the supply
  chain becomes more complex, many-to-many communications
  using poorly defined or poorly implemented standards
  become increasingly burdensome to every participant.
            Standardization may come about in many different
  ways, through ISO, through W3C, through formal and
  informal trade associations, but the critical issue with
  standards is governance.  Why is governance so important? 
  While we all talk about neutrality in the standards world,
  there is a hidden guilty secret in our work -- no standard
  can ever by wholly neutral.  Every standard has an
  unspoken point of view, a set of assumptions that informs
  the entire specification.
            From the point of view of an organization that
  implements a standard, it is critical that the standard is
  stable -- because otherwise there is a risk in committing
  to implementation.  But it’s also important that the
  specification represents a consensus point of view among
  those who will implement it, or at least something close
  to a consensus.
            “Consensus” is an important word in standards
  setting, and ISO has a precise definition of what reaching
  consensus means in its process.  It means bringing the
  discussion to a point where there is no sustained
  opposition.  Getting to consensus can take time, which is
  one of the reasons that standardization processes often
  seem interminable.
            How much easier to impose a proprietary
  solution?  But how should we feel about this in the
  context of governance and neutrality?  Standards codify
  the boring.  They allow people to focus on bigger
  problems.  Standards radically increase efficiency through
  a reduction in complexity, particularly in any environment
  involving many-to-many transactions.  Making it easier to
  keep track over existing market transactions, as well as
  allowing entirely new ones.
            Standards reduce entry barriers and reduce risk. 
  They make for easier system development and reduced
  maintenance, and they reduce supplier lock-in.  In other
  words, standards reduce risk and costs while increasing
  potential revenue.  So, what’s not to like?
            Well, I guess what’s not to like is that the
  rules are laid down by the community and not by the
  individual, and this can create costs and other barriers
  which organizations can find hard to justify in their own
  specific circumstances.
            It’s also very often the case that the costs of
  implementing a new standard in the supply chain, and the
  benefits to be derived from its implementation, are
  unequally distributed.  This can prove to be a
  considerable disincentive.
            Which takes us to another point about standards
  that is often overlooked by those who are not part of this
  world.  It is often assumed that standards are about
  technology.  In reality, as those of us who have worked in
  standards know, another of our guilty secrets, is that
  standards implementation is mostly about establishing
  acceptable social norms to which people willingly adhere.
            That is why my interests have turned more to
  governance in recent years, having what you believe to be
  a better technical solution is no guarantee of acceptance
  in standards as elsewhere.  Governance goes to the heart
  of the challenge.
            So, having thought a bit about identification
  and a bit about standardization, we turn our attention to
  what a media identifier standard should look like in the
  context of facilitating online licensing.  One project --
  now transformed into an organization -- has taken a good
  shot at answering that question:  the Linked Content
  Coalition or LCC.  LCC’s objective was the development of
  a technical framework for an orderly online contents and
  rights supply chain, of which identifiers form an
  intrinsic element.
            This cross-media industry initiative, which was
  funded out of the industry completely, has developed a set
  of principles in answer to four questions about
  identifiers.  Version 1.1 of the LCC Principles of
  Identification was published a little under a year ago. 
  The questions they sought to answer were:  what should be
  identified; what form should an identifier take; how
  should an identifier be assigned; and how should an
  identifier be used.  But they were able to answer these
  complex and far-reaching questions in a document only four
  pages long, although admittedly with extensive appendices
  of supporting material, is pretty remarkable.
            The document is packed with detail that is too
  extensive for me to deal with in its entirety today, but
  I’m going to pick out some of the key issues we need to
  bear in mind.  And for those of you who find this
  interesting, here is a link to the report.
            First, what needs to be identified?  LCC says
  that each entity, which is just another word for thing,
  which needs to be recognized distinctly in the digital
  network should be assigned at least one persistent public
  identifier so that it may be denoted unambiguously
  wherever that is useful.  They define the term “public
  identifier” as one that is accessible and recognizable by
  people or machines within the digital network.
            The things that require identifiers include not
  only items of content, or creations, but also each party,
  person or organization, who is recognized as or claims to
  be a contributor to its rights -- or rights holder in the
  content, or someone who asserts metadata about that
  content.  We also need identifiers for rights and
  licenses.
            In terms of the structure of identifiers, LCC
  has little to say except that identifiers should be
  expressable as universal resource identifiers, URIs, in
  order to be resolvable, a key requirement we will discuss
  a little more under the way and which identifier should be
  used.
            The other structural requirement proposed by LCC
  is that identifiers should be as dumb as possible, in
  other words, should include as little metadata as possible
  about the thing being identified, leaving all information
  to be retrieved from metadata repositories rather than
  inferred from the identifier itself.
            People always want to infer meaning, and will
  often try to teach machines to do the same.  The problem
  is that any apparent meaning in the structure of an
  identifier is all too often misleading and may be used,
  for example, to infer rights ownership, an issue on which
  identifiers should be entirely neutral.  But I think these
  are perhaps longer conversations for another day.
            The LCC-recommended approach to the assignment
  of identifiers is more complex and potentially more
  controversial.  They are relatively straightforward, if
  critical, points about the need for uniqueness and
  persistence, and the requirement for a trusted authority. 
  And a recognition that, in order to be authoritative,
  identifiers should be assigned as early as practicable in
  the creation process.
            But more controversially, LCC also recommends
  that identifiers must be associated with metadata
  repositories that enable the referant, the thing that’s
  being identified, to be discovered and unambiguously
  recognized.  LCC made clear that this isn’t necessarily
  the role of the identifier registration authority itself. 
  Third-party databases may fulfill part of all of the
  requirement, but the preference is clear for authoritative
  metadata registration in an identifier repository managed
  by the identifier or authority.
            This is a proposal that has proved unpalatable
  in some sectors and unimaginable in others, at least
  without significantly more joined-up thinking than is
  currently being achieved.
            The final set of LCC recommendations on
  identifiers, that is regarding deployment, include some
  similarly ambitious and equally controversial
  implications.  First of all, appropriate mechanisms need
  to be developed to associate identifiers directly with the
  object they identify so that people can find the
  identifier when they find the object by in some way
  embedding the identifier into the object itself.
            Every public identifier needs to be resolvable,
  in other words, use standard internet protocols to find
  either the thing it identifies or data about it.  The
  identifier should offer the potential of multiple
  resolution, in other words, any number of different data
  sources should be accessible from a single identifier,
  using standard methods to identify what type of data the
  user is trying to retrieve.
            Throughout the LCC document, there’s a
  consistent stress on the need for people to be able to
  place unequivocal trust in the identification network. 
  And this speaks to the need for transparent but effective
  governance.
            So, measured by this pretty exacting yardstick,
  how are we doing today?  Let’s first think about
  creations, one of the key types of entity that needs to be
  identified.  About 15 years ago, the <indecs> project put
  forward a model to explain the relationships between the
  different aspects of creations that need to be identified
  and managed, particularly to support the management of
  rights and licensing.
            This model, which we called the Model of Making,
  has not been seriously challenged in the interim, and with
  all apologies due to those who have seen it many times
  before, I’m going to use it again here today.  All acts of
  creation start with somebody doing something, writing
  something down, singing a song, filming an event. 
  However, in order for that act, what we call an expression
  in the <indecs> model, for that act of doing something to
  have any continuing identifiable existence, it must first
  be fixed in some kind of medium.  That fixation is, of
  course, critical to any understanding of how intellectual
  property is created and through fixations that the
  underlying abstraction or work can be recognized and
  protected.
            That same abstraction can subsequently be re-
  expressed in a performance, a spatio-temporal performance,
  or refixed in one of many fixations, for example, many
  printed copies of the same book or many digital copies of
  the same piece of sheet music.
            Both expressions and fixations are things that
  we can perceive directly.  In other words, they’re
  manifestations.  The existence of the work on the other
  hand can only ever be inferred.  This means that the
  identification of works is more difficult because there is
  no perceivable object with which the identity can be
  associated.  It exists only in its metadata, its
  description, and its relationship with other identities.
            And this perhaps takes us to the most critical
  issue of all, a reality recognized originally in <indecs>
  but given more prominence in the naming of the Linked
  Content Coalition, the importance of linking of
  relationships.  The understanding in <indecs> is the same
  as that of the basic building blocks of linked data, that
  all metadata can be expressed in terms of relationships
  between identifiers.  This final quote -- oh, sorry, it’s
  gone.
            The <indecs> project definition of metadata was
  that -- sorry, I’ve lost my thread briefly -- was a quote
  from the <indecs> project is critical to any understanding
  of metadata.  “An item of metadata is a relationship that
  somebody claims to exist between two entities.”  So, that
  is actually what metadata is.  It’s about relationships.
            First of all, metadata is about claims, so
  people make claims of that relationship existing.  And,
  secondly, it is about that relationship.  This is the
  world of linked data into which we are now moving online,
  in which identifiers are linked to other identifiers and
  the Internet itself promises to begin to function as a
  single database in which related data is linked to other
  data in new and exciting ways.
            But this is built on dust.  If the identifiers
  themselves are not reliable then the nature of the
  relationship is not clear.  In this context, the precise
  nature of the relationship is as important as the
  identifiers themselves.
            To say the two things are related in some way is
  a truism of startlingly little interest, but to be able to
  say how they are related in ways that are properly
  standardized and controlled begins to create capabilities
  which will bring to life Charles Clark’s famous maxim on
  the future of copyright:  “The answer to the machine lies
  in the machine.”  Technology can now work for the benefit
  of copyright, not against it.  But here again, I’m at risk
  of straying off topic.
            In terms of where we are today, which parts of
  the media industries are doing well and which not so well
  in terms of universal identification systems?  The
  challenges are mixed, some of them because of the embedded
  nature of existing systems, some because standard
  identification systems have not reached the sector at all.
            Music can perhaps be regarded as being in the
  best shape because automated and semi-automated rights
  management has been critical to music for a very long
  time.  The infrastructure for managing identity has
  therefore been well developed with internationally-well-
  established ISO-governed identifiers for musical works,
  the ISWC, and for recordings, the ISRC.  The music
  collection societies were also early in adopting their own
  standard way of identifying people in organizations, the
  Interested Parties Information system or IPI.
            But there are gaps.  There is no definitive
  database of ISRCs available and no authoritative source of
  the relationship between ISRCs and ISWCs, although there
  are commercially available sources of data, which are
  becoming more comprehensive.  And while very comprehensive
  in terms of coverage of the sector, the IPI itself is a
  proprietary system and closed to those outside the
  collecting societies.
            The book-publishing sector has, as we’ve already
  discussed, had a product identifier for getting on for 50
  years.  This need to identify products dictated most of
  its critical set of requirements, and the ISBN has been
  astoundingly successful in meeting these requirements,
  although not always so good at meeting some of the other
  requirements that have been expected of it as the years
  have gone by.
            More recently, there’s been some significant
  problem with the granularity of application of the ISBN to
  ebooks which has threatened the global integrity of the
  standard and has meant that it is more difficult to
  understand exactly what an ISBN for an ebook represents. 
  This remains a work in progress.
            However, attempts by the publishing industry to
  introduce a work identifier, the ISTC or International
  Standard Text Code, equivalent to the music industry’s
  ISWC, have not been marked by a single success.  There
  proved to be insufficient value from identifying works in
  the existing physical and digital supply chain and
  insufficient scale in rights management.  Organizations
  managing rights in books, like those I chair in the UK,
  have to infer the identity of works from the identity of
  products of those works.
            However, book publishing is working on the
  significant potential for the widespread adoption of a
  cross-sectoral party identifier, the I-S-N-I, or ISNI. 
  The ISNI started making assignments in the literary
  sector, linking records held in the giant virtual
  international authority file, which is in the domain of
  the national libraries, with records held in other party
  identification systems and now has over eight-and-a-half
  million confirmed identities issued to creators from all
  walks of life -- writers, musicians, and filmmakers.
            And here I’m showing you my ISNI entry, only to
  demonstrate the way in which it is bridging identities
  between very different worlds, in this instance, between
  library catalogs and author societies, the Authors
  Licensing and Copyright Society of which I’m a member, and
  VIAF.  These worlds, long separate and with little
  apparent common interest, are now coming together very
  effectively to share a common identity standard, and this
  is now extending into other types of requirement like
  books in print catalogs, not replacing existing identifier
  systems but enhancing them.
            I believe we can be optimistic about the long-
  term adoption of the ISNI, though it takes a long time for
  such systems to become universal, often for a very banal
  reasons to do with the cost of reconfiguring legacy
  systems.
            The position of other sectors of publishing is a
  bit mixed.  Journals publishers have been extremely
  effective in identifying individual articles using the
  CrossRef implementation of the digital object identifier,
  the DOI.  The DOI is an ISO standard which both deals with
  resolvability and can help with cross-sectoral
  interoperability, and I think you’ll hear more about it
  later in the day.
            CrossRef has around 70 million items identified,
  not only journal articles, but also scholarly books and
  book chapters, technical standards, theses and
  dissertations.  CrossRef has also been heavily involved in
  the development of an identifier researchers, the ORCID,
  which is separate from but coordinated with ISNI.
            Magazines and newspapers, on the other hand,
  have found little justification for any public identifier
  for their articles, although they do have the
  international standard serial number allocated, as indeed
  do journals, alongside their CrossRef DOIs.
            The audiovisual world has two identifiers for
  works -- the ISAN and the EIDR, the latter, like CrossRef,
  an implementation of the digital object identifier.  EIDR
  is something a newcomer but already has over 700,000
  individual registrations and is growing at a very
  considerable rate.  Although it originated here in the US,
  it is seeing rapid deployment in other countries.
            ISAN and EIDR came from very different sets of
  requirements and have pursued very different approaches to
  identifying audiovisual works.  EIDR is not unlike the
  ISNI in that the EIDR database links together the many
  different proprietary identifiers that are widely used in
  the distribution of television programs and movies.  It
  doesn’t seek to supplant these existing identification
  systems; rather, it seeks to enhance their continuing
  value by linking them together.
            So, here is an example of that from an EIDR
  record, all the different IDs for the same thing being
  linked into the EIDR.  EIDR data also allows the
  publication of exactly the type of linkage between
  different entities that I talked about earlier.  As you
  can see, in this example, EIDR identifies not only
  audiovisual works but also manifestations and codifies the
  relationships between them in a structured way.  From this
  point of view, it can be see as a model of identification
  good practice.
            The last individual sector I will look at,
  briefly, is the visual arts and particularly photography,
  but that will also take me on to the whole question of
  user-generated content.  The professional photographic
  market has never developed a requirement for a standard
  identifier, presumably because of the very simplicity of
  the supply chain from the individual photographer through
  an intermediary, the photo agency, to the user, typically
  a professional buyer.
            Projects like the PLUS Coalition, which is
  represented here today, have made a very strong and
  persuasive argument for the implementation of standard
  identifiers but up until now have struggled to get really
  universal traction.  The challenge has been that there is
  typically no need for aggregation of data by third
  parties, no need to track complex transactions through a
  supply chain, and, therefore, no obvious set of
  requirements has ever emerged for an industry-wide
  identifier.
            However, the work of projects like the Copyright
  Hub about which you’re going to hear much more, is
  beginning to make the case for universal application of
  identification to photographs and indeed to all creations,
  every type of creation that is being made and posted on
  the Internet by all of us every day.
            This is a considerable challenge.  Identifier
  standards have typically been the preserve of large
  organizations rather than individual creators.  There is
  another challenge.  While, as we’ve seen, creations and
  parties have identifier standards of varying levels of
  maturity and breadth of implementation, there is currently
  no standard for identifying statements of rights or
  licenses.  LCC and the Copyright Hub are working together
  on prototyping such an ID, which should enable the network
  of rights data to be distributed and navigated a great
  deal more easily around the network.
            During the course of my working lifetime in the
  media, I’ve seen a steady process of democratization in
  the tools available for the creation of content and more
  recently for its publication.  Now we can all create
  content of all types -- publications, music, photographs,
  movies -- using tools that less than a generation ago
  would have seemed unimaginably powerful.  And we can make
  them available to a potential market of billions of people
  at the click of a button.  This is democratization indeed.
            But we now have the opportunity to democratize
  the tools of rights management and licensing in exactly
  the same way.  As creators, we all have the right, but not
  always the ability, to decide how our content should be
  used.  Secure, unambiguous identification is the essential
  first step.  We will need to find ways to make the
  identification network work for everyone.
            Thank you.
            (Applause).
                        THE CHALLENGES:
          GAPS IN COVERAGE AND AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you so much for that. 
  Very interesting.  I’m here to introduce the first panel
  and ask the first panelists to come up to the platform
  here.  Our first panel today is going to be talking about
  the current challenges with standard identifiers.  It’s
  going to talk about the gaps in coverage and the areas for
  improvement.  It will be moderated by John Morris from the
  National Telecommunications and Information Administration -- is
  that right, John?  He’s the Administrator and Director of
  Internet Policy at NTIA, and he will moderate this first
  panel.  And I’m sorry, some of the placards are probably
  going to be on the floor if there’s not enough table space
  for them.
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay, can folks -- yes.  It’s on,
  perfect.  So, thank you, Ann, but let’s get started.  So,
  are these mics -- do we have to turn them on?  Yeah, okay.
            Okay, well, so let’s get started.  Mark’s intro
  or Mark’s presentation was a tremendous setup for this
  panel, and we have really kind of an international set of
  experts on identifiers, and we’re going to spend an hour
  talking about the kind of pros and cons and problems and
  issues that we need to raise.  So, let me just kind of
  very briefly kind of introduce our panel.
            I’ll start down at the end with Fred -- okay,
  I’m going to mess it up now -- Fred Beteille.  Okay.  So,
  Fred is Head of Product Content Strategy for Google and
  YouTube, and he was former Head of Business Affairs at the
  Harry Fox Agency and COO/CTO of RightsFlow, which was then
  acquired by Google.  So, really, in his career, he’s kind
  of focused on building products that use identifiers to
  both license content and to pay for content and to present
  content -- manifest content to users, so he’s kind of seen
  the, you know, world from all sides.
            Coming down here, we have Joel Holland, who is
  the Founder and CEO of VideoBlocks, which is the
  subscription-based, royalty-free -- provider of royalty-
  free stock video and graphics.  So, he’s kind of, you
  know, really in the middle of kind of an identifier space,
  although some of his content, as we’ll hear, doesn’t have
  identifiers, and I think we’ll kind of talk about some of
  the problems as to why his content doesn’t have
  identifiers.
            Raymond Drewry has spent most of his
  professional life kind of designing platforms that -- on
  which other people can build applications.  He’s right now
  Principal Scientist at MovieLab, focused on identifiers
  and metadata.  And he produced the first initial design of
  the EIDR system that we just heard about from Mark.  And
  he’s going to have lots of different opinions about that
  kind of good and bad ways to make identifiers interact.
            Paul Jessop has been involved in music since,
  you know, in the ‘90s, and, you know, kind of first
  started looking at piracy but now is kind of heavily
  looking at metadata and international standards and has
  been involved in a bunch of the standards.  I’m going to
  trip over all of the acronyms.  But he heads the -- I
  mean, he is kind of on both sides of the Atlantic.  He,
  you know, works here in the US on the US registration
  agency on a number of the standards identifiers, but he
  also heads the UK delegation to the ISO committee that
  oversees a bunch of the identifiers.
            And then, finally, you know, Laura has had a 30-
  year career in the book publishing industry and has kind
  of served her time on creating a number of these standards
  but now works as Product Manager of Intota at ProQuest and
  Treasurer of ISNI, the ISNI international agency.
            So, it’s a great panel.  Let me kind of start
  off with a kind of a general question to each one, and why
  don’t we start with Laura and go down, just to kind of,
  you know, explain really where you fit in the identifier
  ecosystem.
            MS. DAWSON:  Well, as you mentioned, I serve as
  Treasurer for the International Standard Name Identifier
  agency.  And, also, ProQuest is a registration agency for
  ISNI.  So, in that capacity, I’m an evangelist
  essentially, and that’s both internally and externally to
  ProQuest.  And my role right now is mainly to encourage
  adoption.
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay.
            MR. JESSOP:  A word of explanation -- I do not
  work in the United States.  I’d need a green card for
  that; I don’t have one.  As I’m on federal property, I’m
  nervous about that.
            MR. MORRIS:  Excuse me.  You work with the
  United States.  Let’s say that.
            MR. JESSOP:  Always delighted to.  Ever since
  those guys in red coats were involved in the action.  So,
  I’m involved in a number of these IS-something-something
  standards, and like Laura who I work with on ISNI, act as
  a bit of an evangelist for this stuff.  Very much spend my
  life going around saying what Mark Bide said, because what
  we just heard is the core of all we do, and if there’s one
  piece of that that I say to people time after time, it’s
  you’ve got to understand what it is you’re identifying,
  which bit of that magic triangle it is that the number
  applies to, and if you understand that, you stand a
  fighting chance of getting it right.
            MR. MORRIS:  Raymond?
            MR. DREWRY:  So, a few years -- well, more than
  a few years ago now, I was doing some work on some
  projects at MovieLabs around metadata and some anti-piracy
  stuff in digital cinema and online distribution and
  thought, golly, this would be easier with a reliable
  standard unique identifier for various levels of
  granularity.
            So, I looked around, and there wasn’t one.  And
  I thought, how hard can it be.  And, so, the answer is
  it’s actually pretty hard, not in the technical sense, but
  in the social sense of getting everybody to agree and
  compromise a little bit and get companies that may not
  like each other to say, golly, we should do this.
            So, what I do mostly now is I continue working
  on the technical aspects of the entertainment ID registry,
  but also spend a lot of time working with the members of
  that group and other companies and how they use it,
  because the identifier is of no value at all unless people
  use it.  It has to get into the supply chain, into the
  value chain and all those places.
            MR. HOLLAND:  So, at VideoBlocks, we’re
  basically like -- you’re probably familiar with
  Shutterstock or Getty Images, the stock photo model.  So,
  we do the same thing for video clips, for graphics, and
  for music.  And we distribute about a million of these
  clips a month, out into the world to video production
  companies and end-users, some of which do kind of fall off
  the back of the truck and wind up being illegally used.
            So, the topic of identifiers are very
  interesting to us.  I think it’s a pretty big challenge
  because for music, music kind of inherently has a
  fingerprint to it.  Right, it’s easy to kind of
  automatically identify.  And then distributors like
  YouTube are really good at saying, hey, we know, we
  recognize this, we see this pattern and we know what this
  is.
            Video clips are a lot more difficult in my
  experience, and there’s not yet been a really easy way to
  automatically identify, hey, this video clip belongs to
  this creator.  You know, when we shoot stuff originally
  and distribute the clips, it does have metadata attached,
  but once a video editor takes it, puts it in a project,
  encodes it, transcodes it, that data kind of usually gets
  wiped off.  So, it can be very difficult to kind of track
  where it ends up going.  So, I think that’s what’s
  interesting for us is to see technically how could you
  actually identify video clips and photographs in an easier
  way.
            MR. MORRIS:  Fred?
            MR. BETEILLE:  So, at YouTube, as you might
  imagine, we’re getting content feeds from a variety of
  sources all around the world, both from users that are
  posting content, in addition to people in the music
  business, the film business, every type of media business. 
  And the backbone of all these systems and the content it
  uses and that scans all this content and it identifies
  what’s licensed, who to pay, all that type of stuff, the
  root of it is all based on identifiers.  So, we couldn’t
  be more aligned in trying to get these out there to
  everyone and to make sure that they work well.
            Obviously, you know, there are numerous
  challenges with doing that all around the world, which
  that’s what this panel is about, but we’re supremely
  committed to this.  I also -- you know, I’m Chairman of
  the Music Business Association, and we do all sorts of
  forums and educational opportunities, amongst other
  things, to educate people as to what they are, how to use
  them, how to use them properly, et cetera.  So, this is a
  big, big, big issue for us, and I probably know more about
  this -- I wish I could forget what I know about this. 
  I’ll put it that way.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, before we really kind of dig
  into some of the challenges, let’s start with some of the
  success stories.  I mean, and I’m not going to want to go
  down the line every time, you know.  Let me just ask the
  panel, and feel free to just jump in, you know, raise your
  hand or whatever.  You know, where have we seen
  identifiers really work and really, you know, help further
  a market?  So, let’s have some examples of some success.
            Raymond?
            MR. DREWRY:  So, one of the big problems with
  video distribution on the Internet is the handoff from the
  producer to the post-production house to the redistributor
  to the final entity that actually distributes it.  And
  until recently it was very inefficient.  It was done with
  Excel spreadsheets if you were very lucky and phone calls
  and email if you weren’t.  And you had to say, Is this
  really what I want and what does Harry Potter 3 mean?  I
  thought it had a real title and things like that.
            So, with the EIDR identifier, in conjunction
  with another MovieLab spec, which is called MovieLab’s
  Veils (phonetic), which is how producers say I have all
  this stuff that you can license and distribute to your
  customers, we have two good cases there.  Warner Brothers
  and Microsoft, Xbox, Xbox Live, I guess it is, did a
  project where they replaced the spreadsheets and the phone
  calls with EIDR identifiers in structured XML documents,
  and they figured that for that sort of point-to-point
  transaction between Warner and Microsoft, they saved on
  the order of 3,000 person hours a year of collated and
  manual checking and ringing, asking why is this not what I
  wanted.
            And we saw a similar thing with GooglePlay, who
  have been one of the big adopters of using the EIDR
  identifier.  They don’t generate IDs yet, but they use
  them a lot, so they’ve reduced the processing time, once
  again entirely through automation, with reliable IDs that
  they trust from ingesting a thousand new titles a week
  from 50 hours down to about 20 minutes for that same
  batch.  And that’s all because the identifiers can be
  trusted, you can look up what they mean, and they’re
  embedded in other standards that you can then exchange
  them with.  So, I think that’s a big plus all around.
            MS. DAWSON:  In the book industry, obviously
  Mark mentioned the ISBN.  It is a roaring success for
  print titles.  Ebooks are another thing entirely.
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay.  Paul?
            MR. JESSOP:  So, in recorded music, if you go
  back to the late ‘80s, I suppose the ISRC system was
  introduced.  The archeology of that suggests it was
  actually Phillips and Sony when they invented the CD that
  wanted a track identifier.  I can’t prove that; I can’t
  disprove it, but it’s out there and people broadly used it
  until the iTunes store came along.  And Apple said, if you
  want to put something on our store, you need to have an
  international standard identifier so that we understand
  what it means.
            And they did that, and that completely
  revolutionized the saliency and importance of ISRC so that
  in effect now into the legitimate supply chain almost
  everything has an ISRC.  That’s not to say there aren’t
  problems about duplication, about misassignment to the
  same recording used in different places -- this is the
  granularity issue that Mark was talking about -- but I
  think it has to be regarded as a great success we got that
  far.
            Does it go far enough?  Some people say not
  because unlike EIDR you can’t look it up, you can’t search
  for it, you can’t resolve it.  People are looking at ways
  of addressing that, and people are starting to ask, how do
  we find out what the requirements are, who needs this in
  the industry, does what we have actually suit all the
  needs we have?
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay.  Anyone?
            MR. BETEILLE:  Yes.  So, I think one of the
  things that worked well, and not to just echo Paul, but in
  the music space, ISRCs are widely used.  Of course we know
  the challenges.  I think it works particularly well with
  the head content in terms of the stuff that drives the
  most revenue.  Generally, these things are manually
  curated and scrubbed and the -- at various entities over
  time, and so we have databases that have accurate
  information on it.
            The further you go down the income chain, I
  think the worse it gets, and that’s a big challenge,
  right, as the world becomes more democratized in terms of
  content creation, you know, I think that those problems
  are going to get more weight and more relevance to all of
  us.  So, I think that’s one of the challenges, but I do
  agree that that’s one of the huge success stories.
            MR. JESSOP:  Maybe I could just comment on that. 
  It’s an interesting lesson, maybe.  The big boys look
  after themselves.  The major record labels, the big
  independents, they’ve got IT departments, they’ve got
  people who can read manuals, they understand the
  specifications and they do it right.  People a little
  further down the line than that are stressed out; they
  don’t have the people; they need to get something out to
  the street; sometimes they make mistakes.
            Go a bit further down the tail, you find that
  people tend to use professional aggregators who do the
  work for them.  And broadly those people look like major
  record companies.  They’ve got IT departments; they can
  read specifications; they can do it right.  They have to
  do it right or else they’ll get sued by their clients. 
  So, they’ve got an incentive to do it right.
            But then you get beyond them into the truly
  user-generated self-releasing artist and it gets bad
  again.
            MS. DAWSON:  Exactly.
            MR. JESSOP:  So, there are some lessons for who
  does the work, who should we incentivize to do the work,
  and what will the quality consequences of that be.
            MR. BETEILLE:  And in that tail, I mean, they
  have no concept of what we’re talking about.
            MS. DAWSON:  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.  We say that in
  book publishing, too.
            MR. DREWRY:  Same thing for film and television. 
  There’s an amazing number of 10-minute long, central-
  government-funded documentaries from Eastern Europe that
  really could be identified, but they just aren’t.
            MR. MORRIS:  All right.  You want to --
            MR. HOLLAND:  Well, the one interesting thing
  I’ve seen in the stock media world is that, you know,
  years ago music creators knew a lot more about, right,
  they knew what ASCAP/BMI was, they knew the concept of cue
  sheets, they knew what composer rights were, right?  They
  knew these things.  This new crop of creators that we now
  work with coming out of college, they don’t know what any
  of this stuff is.  And they don’t really care, right? 
  They just want to create music and sell it.  And that’s
  interesting, right?
            So, most of our composers now, the way that they
  -- I mean, they rely on us to pay them obviously for the
  content, and then once it makes its way out into the
  world, a lot of it ends up on outlets like YouTube, and so
  then we kind of rely on YouTube to help us with that
  fingerprinting to find out when a song is being used.  If
  it’s being used properly, that’s great, and we white label
  or white list the channels.  But if it’s being used
  improperly, at least we can help monetize and get money to
  the composer.  But it’s just been interesting to watch
  that shift.
            MS. DAWSON:  Do you find yourself having to
  educate these folks?
            MR. HOLLAND:  Yes, in a way, but what’s
  interesting is a lot of them coming out are just not
  really interested in the old way things were done.
            MS. DAWSON:  Right, right, right, yeah.
            MR. HOLLAND:  Yeah.
            MS. DAWSON:  Yeah, we see that in self-
  publishing, as well.
            MR. HOLLAND:  Yeah, it’s interesting.  They just
  want to be -- they want to be fairly compensated but in a
  new way.
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. HOLLAND:  It’s like they want to get paid
  for what they’re creating, and they want to make sure
  their stuff is not stolen and used improperly.
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. HOLLAND:  But it’s just very different
  today, which is interesting.
            MR. JESSOP:  But there’s also a fact a lot of
  people don’t want to get paid.  They’re really not very
  interested, but they do want to get credit; they do want
  to be recognized as being the creator of something.  We
  see this a lot in the DJ space, that people aren’t really
  that bothered.  They recognize the amounts of money are
  quite small.  They make a living from live DJ-ing, and
  when people take their sets and remix them, they just want
  a credit, because it improves their chances of getting the
  next gig.
            And sometimes achieving that through the
  existing identification systems is quite hard because they
  kind of weren’t designed to do that, and they may need
  redesigning to accommodate them.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, I think the panel has already
  completely proved the whole reason that we’re here today,
  is that I asked a question about success stories and we
  spent almost the entire time talking about challenges.
            (Laughter).
            MR. MORRIS:  And, so, I mean, let’s turn the
  question to that, you know, a little more directly.  I
  mean, let me start down the line and ask, I mean, as, you
  know, Fred, you’re really here kind of probably the
  biggest consumer on the panel of identifiers.  So, I mean,
  why don’t you start and kind of, you know, start really,
  you know, putting out challenges and problems and issues.
            MR. BETEILLE:  Sure, sure.  I know we talked
  about this a little bit in the opening, it was talked
  about a little but.  So, there’s many, many layers to
  this, right?  So, there’s the identification of the
  content, like this ISRC is this recording, you know, this
  ISNI is this entity, this person, or whatever.  But it
  gets deeper than that, because it’s all interconnected,
  right?  You can’t just have these siloed information sets
  out there in the marketplace.  It doesn’t work.
            So, just the way that YouTube works, just so we
  all understand, like people post videos on YouTube or
  media companies or anyone posts a video on YouTube. 
  Content ID scans it and identifies it.  It says I know
  what this is because a rights holder has given us
  information, what we call a reference file, to be able to
  identify what it is.
            And, so, all of a sudden, in many cases that
  could be an audiovisual work, so there may be an EIDR or
  an ISAN or whatever in it.  And we know what that is. 
  Beneath those layers of identifiers, there’s different
  right structures.  So, the same ISAN can have a different
  owner for online media, for physical media, and then even
  in online media there’s different -- there’s subscription,
  there’s video-on-demand, there’s different layers.  So,
  the same ISAN can have myriad permutations of rights, you
  know, infrastructure or whatever, rights owners.
            And then that tie could tie to an audio -- to an
  audio, so audio content, to an ISRC.  And that can tie to
  an ISWC.  And those are owned by people, and they have
  IPIs or ISNIs or not.  Right?  So, like that entire chain
  has to work in order for commerce to happen, right, in
  order for it to happen in a scalable way.  And, so, we use
  -- really, we use this information to identify content, to
  understand what we have licensed, to pay it.
            And then when we make products where we are
  trying to make a music product, for instance, or even a
  video product, it says, look, this is what’s going to be
  presented to a user.  These identifiers are used to
  literally target what it is that we’re putting in front of
  our user.  So, when it’s wrong and that chain breaks down,
  we have a poor user experience, and then that creates
  real, real commercial issues, meaning the products aren’t
  worth buying, they’re not worth using.  And that’s not
  good for anybody.
            So, to me, like the biggest, biggest challenge,
  and I know this is not specifically like one identifier’s
  challenge or responsibility is the interconnectivity of
  all of them.  Like, again, without it, nothing happens.
            MR. MORRIS:  Others want to jump in?
            MR. DREWRY:  So, I agree that the
  interconnectivity really is the hard part.  Identifying
  audiovisual works in there, you know, how many edits of
  Blade Runner are there really and that kind of thing, is
  challenging, but it’s not impossible.  The main barriers
  are essentially corporate inertia at the end of the day. 
  And then you have the other problem of smaller works. 
  That’s different because how do you determine uniqueness
  of a video of an iceberg or the White House or something.
            But the interconnectedness is much harder
  because what you have to do there is everybody has to
  trust all the identifiers in order to trust the links. 
  You have to have a party identifier everybody uses and
  likes and a work identifier that everybody uses and likes. 
  So, that’s one of the things that we’ve tried to do in
  EIDR is really encourage people to put in as many outside
  identifiers as they possibly can for these works.
            We have some items that have production numbers
  for all six of the Hollywood major studios because they’ve
  all distributed the film at one point or another.  And
  that means no matter what supply chain you find it in you
  have a chance of going and finding it in the EIDR
  database, which in turn one day, you know, come whatever
  comes, they’ll be able to take that identifier and say now
  I’m going to throw that at a rights database and see what
  happens, but it’s making that connection between kinds of
  identifiers that’s really the hard part right now.
            MS. DAWSON:  I think for us in book publishing
  there are two major sources of stress.  One is, of course,
  that none of the major retailers of ebooks requires any
  book to have an ISBN.  It’s not a requirement.  And, in
  fact, if you try to provide one, they won’t display it. 
  So, it’s really discouraging the self-published authors
  specifically not to even bother to get ISBNs.  So, that’s
  a huge problem.
            The other is among publishers in the US at
  least, there is a lot of disagreement about what
  constitutes a work, which is why work identifiers have
  really been slow to take off here.  Publishers define them
  one way; retailers define them another way; libraries
  define them yet another way.  You know, so there’s all
  kinds of disagreement about what a work actually means.
            And we periodically at the Book Industry Study
  Group’s Identification Committee, we periodically think
  we’re going to talk about it again, and we all like shy
  away from it because it’s such a fraught discussion.
            MR. JESSOP:  Because, perhaps, we’re starting
  with this abstract concept of work rather than starting
  with what is it that people need to know in order to do
  business.
            MS. DAWSON:  Right, right.
            MR. JESSOP:  So, we’ve been doing some work. 
  Mark mentioned ISTC, not a runaway success, relatively
  small numbers of registrations.  The work remains internal
  and proprietary, and we’re still thinking about how to
  deal with that, but we found a lot of disagreement -- no,
  not a lot of disagreement -- a lot of agreement that there
  were disparate requirements because of different
  applications.
            Some people wanted to cluster together only the
  things that had essentially the same text, so the
  paperback, the hardback, the audio book, the ebook.  Some
  people wanted to include translations.
            MS. DAWSON:  Yeah.
            MR. JESSOP:  Because you may want to be
  presented with a list of choices, and it may be that the
  book’s available in your language and you’d rather read it
  in your own language.
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. JESSOP:  Some people want to include the
  children’s bath book, because it’s essentially the same
  thing, it’s got the same characters, although the text may
  be completely different.  And for those different
  purposes, different applications, you get different
  requirements, which may mean you need a different
  identifier or a different profile of the same identifier
  or to identify those clusters differently within the same
  system.  All of those can work, but you need to make a
  decision and get consensus around it.
            MS. DAWSON:  Also, the larger publishers, when
  it came down to public domain works, had some reluctance
  to refer customers to competing editions of those works. 
  So, they wanted the wall up as high as it would go.
            MR. JESSOP:  Yeah, public domain works create
  some real headaches in the identification world because
  you may end up with a -- a hierarchy of rights within
  something, only some of which are public domain.
            MS. DAWSON:  Yeah.
            MR. JESSOP:  So, a recording can be clearly
  public domain, but the underlying work can still be in
  copyright.  But who is it, pray, that has the authority to
  give an identifier to the recording?  It was never given
  one when it was recorded in the ‘40s, because the systems
  didn’t exist, but nobody owns it now so nobody has the
  locus standi, to use the lawyer’s term --
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. JESSOP:  -- to do that.  But underlying
  that, there are still living or recently dead songwriters
  whose living depends upon that working properly.  So,
  that’s a tough one.
            MS. DAWSON:  Yep.  And we say again in book
  publishing when the ISDC was sort of up for further
  evangelization publishers saying, well, who has the right
  to assign that number, and they did not trust the
  registration agencies that were already out there.
            MR. DREWRY:  So, one of the things that we’ve
  done in EIDR is anybody who is a member of EIDR -- so
  anybody can read the database, if you find an EIDR ID in
  the wild, you can just go look it up, and that’s fine, we
  like that.  But we only let EIDR members register new IDs. 
  But we will let any member register any ID if they need
  it, and that means, for example, that out of copyright
  works or works that have no obvious owner end up getting
  identifiers in the hierarchy of edits and translations
  gets created.
            And we’ve had some very, very good work done by
  National Film Archives at doing this, so wanting to get
  the entire UK filmography registered or we’re starting
  something here with the US filmography and so on.  And
  then you get all these links between things, and you can
  start people, even if you say, oh, it’s just archives,
  don’t get fussed over it yet.  And then you sort of
  acclimate people to saying, oh, it’s the social governance
  of the identifier that matters, not who registered it. 
  Other industries may have a harder time with that model.
            MS. DAWSON:  I think it’s, too, part of the
  problem with at least public domain stuff is -- and
  archival stuff is they’re not huge revenue-drivers, so
  there’s not a whole lot of investment on maintaining that
  data.
            MR. MORRIS:  Fred?
            MR. BETEILLE:  There’s also the
  internationalization issue of public domain.  You know,
  different territories have different rules, so it gets
  super complex to say that this is in public domain here,
  but it may not be elsewhere.
            MR. DREWRY:  So, for me, the key thing there is
  to be very, very, very strict, as Mark suggested, about
  the identifier, and if the rights are different, you can
  use the identifier to find some rights, but if you let the
  rights creep into the identification of the work, you’re
  in for a boatload of trouble very soon.
            MS. DAWSON:  Yeah, we have a guy at BISG named
  George Wright who constantly says let the identifier
  identify, let the metadata describe.  They’re two different
  functions, and if you merge them, your systems are not
  going to work.
            MR. BETEILLE:  Or you’re going to have a lot of
  identifiers.
            MS. DAWSON:  Yes.
            MR. JESSOP:  And we have this concept of
  reference metadata, and the reference metadata is the
  minimum amount of data you need to make sure that the
  association between the entity and the identifier is
  accurate and trustworthy.  And if you start loading in
  more, then you end up with bloat and you end up with
  ambiguity and you end up with a shedload of work to do,
  which you don’t need to do.  And I’m fond of saying that
  the probability of failure of a system to manage this
  stuff goes up with a square of the number of metadata
  relevance.  And if you look at the music industry of
  recent years, you can see some validation for this.  Law
  of nature, you need to keep it down to the absolute
  minimum, as you say, let the metadata identify what it is
  you’re identifying.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, let’s talk for a minute about
  works that don’t have identifiers.  I mean, we heard
  photographs in general, but I think, Joel, you have some
  categories of work that you work with that right now you
  don’t have identifiers.  So, why is that and can we fix it
  in this room today?
            MR. HOLLAND:  Yeah, actually, it’s interesting. 
  So, I mean, in fact, let’s talk about photographs, and I
  think this is pretty perplexing.  This is a really tough
  problem.  So, you know, when a group -- when a big agency
  or a brand wants to take a photo of the White House and
  put it into an ad, their rough -- for them to identify it,
  they go to Getty or they go to Shutterstock.  They go to
  an agency where they trust the source, right?  They don’t
  really care -- everything else are like I know I’m getting
  it from Getty; they’re going to indemnify me if I get
  sued, so I’m okay, right?
            So, a lot of times, big brands go to trusted
  sources.  They just trust that it’s good.  Where it
  becomes much more problematic, though, is when there’s
  like a breaking news event, right, and someone uses their
  cellphone to shoot an image and the news agencies or other
  groups ultimately find that image on the Internet and want
  to license it, right?  And they can try to trust the
  person that says I took this and then later get sued when
  that person didn’t actually take it, right?
            So, that would be a case where an identifier for
  these images would be very useful.  But the last that I
  read is that there are over 2 billion photos being created
  every day, right?  I don’t know how it’s possible to
  manage that.  I mean, that’s crazy.
            MS. DAWSON:  I think user-generated content is
  probably going to be one of the intractable problems for
  organizations like ours forever and ever.
            MR. JESSOP:  Maybe Fred’s about to say the same
  thing I’m about to say:  we should look at automated
  identification.  And I think most of us, when we first saw
  Shazam recognizing music in a noisy bar, we thought, wow,
  this is actually magic.  It can’t possibly work, but it
  does.  And content ID on the Google systems is this
  phenomenally successful, you know, not perfect, but allows
  the monetization of content for a whole bunch of people
  who would otherwise not have a route to getting paid for
  the exploitation.
            And the automated recognition of content is a
  fabulous thing, but I’d suggest that it’s not the same as
  identifying the content itself.  It’s a tool for tying the
  two together.  If you regard the fingerprint, if you want
  to call it that, as being the identifier, you lose a whole
  bunch of things like interoperability, because that
  fingerprint stays within the system that generated it and
  it’s not shareable.  Typically, the technology is
  proprietary and it’s hard to use outside of the original
  system, but it’s a great tool for, as I say, tying the
  content to its identifier, but the identifier needs to be
  held separately.
            MR. BETEILLE:  Yeah, I was going to say
  something similar, but basically, you know, that’s how
  content ID works.  It actually uses the binary of -- you
  know, that is created from the content to identify other
  uses of that content.  So, in that particular case, like
  in the network of YouTube, I guess, it’s -- you know, you
  can get away with not having an identifier in those
  instances, right?  But once you get outside that, which is
  the rest of the world, it doesn’t work.
            So, I feel like maybe there’s a lot of ways that
  we could probably help solve that problem, but I do agree
  with Paul that you’re going to need some identification
  when you get outside a proprietary system to identify it
  elsewhere in the world when it’s used.
            MR. JESSOP:  And these systems also have the
  potential to be a super tool for de-duplicating the
  existing databases.  We know that in the music space for
  reasons of history a bunch of -- on a bunch of occasions
  the same recording has been given multiple codes, multiple
  ISRCs, and those have rippled through into databases,
  Fred’s and other people’s.  If we can use fingerprinting
  technology to identify which of those are the same, then
  we can get closer to having the ideal of one identifier
  for each entity.
            MR. BETEILLE:  Right, so we do that, right?  So,
  just in order to run the business, like I talked before
  about the chain of links between assets, I guess, when we
  have problems, we have to remediate them, and we share
  that data with the partner that gave us the data that we
  thought might be bad.  We don’t make a judgment on it
  necessarily.
            Where it gets problematic there is that if it
  doesn’t get corrected at the source it still permeates
  around elsewhere, around, you know, other areas of
  commerce, not just YouTube.  And, so, you know, again,
  we’re fully transparent with that data, just so we --
  we’re trying to do the right thing to get that stuff
  corrected, but, again, it has to be corrected at the
  source or it will just permeate around elsewhere.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, let’s stay for a moment on what
  you, I think, all have identified as one of the hardest
  problems of user-generated content.  I mean, I think it
  was you earlier who said that some ebook publishers are
  not -- are neither accepting nor encouraging self-
  published authors --
            MS. DAWSON:  The retailers --
            MR. MORRIS:  -- yeah.
            MS. DAWSON:  -- are not accepting ISBN
  information.
            MR. MORRIS:  Right.  So, I mean, are there
  platforms for user-generated content that are going to
  really aggressively trying to encourage --
            MS. DAWSON:  No.
            MR. MORRIS:  -- their users, their generators --
            MS. DAWSON:  Right, yeah.  I would argue
  actually in the case of Amazon, the opposite.  Amazon is
  not a friend to the ISBN.
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay.
            MR. BETEILLE:  To me, in previous panels, just
  speaking specifically about music, I always thought it was
  at the point of creation is where these things had to be
  dealt with, if at all possible, right?  The sooner you get
  to it, the better.  So, one thought could be, and I’m just
  literally riffing, is, you know, at the point where these
  people are distributing the content, so these users
  generate content, they put it on, it’s gone.  Once you
  miss that critical point, that point of intention, if
  you’re not giving them, you know, an identifier there,
  you’re going to lose them.
            So, one thought could be that wherever these
  points of distribution or commerce sites are, maybe they
  could get in the value chain and start being -- I don’t
  know what you would call it -- ISRC distributors or ISO
  identifier distributors, I should say, you know, maybe
  that’s one way you get it, you get it at the point of
  creation, the point of intention, before you lose their
  attention.
            MR. DREWRY:  So, one of the problems there is
  that for short-form film and video and so on you don’t
  really know what the right metadata is to say this is
  different from the other thing, right.  For professional
  film or even a high-end, you know, small-run DVD you know
  producer and director and an actor if there is one and
  that kind of thing.  There’s some stuff you can latch
  onto.  For user-generated video, if you say, oh, this is a
  user-generated video and it’s three minutes long and it’s
  of cats and uploaded by John Morris, there might be six of
  those, you know, in a given day.
            MR. MORRIS:  Six hundred, right?
            MR. DREWRY:  You just never know.  So, you don’t
  know what the differentiating metadata can be, and then
  you think, well, maybe the fingerprint then becomes part
  of the differentiating metadata, but that gets you into a
  problem as what happens when you change things, you know,
  do edits of it and so on, and it’s -- there’s nothing to
  latch onto, and I think that’s the fundamental problem
  here is that to identify something you have to be able to
  say something unique about it, and I don’t know what that
  is for most YouTube content.
            MR. HOLLAND:  I think, you know, the alternative
  way to look at this potentially is if you can’t get
  identifiers onto all user-generated media, which I think
  is impossible in some ways, it’s creating, you know, this
  trusted relationship between the licensor and the
  licensee, right?  So, if you’re a creator, it’s creating
  more awareness that there are ways to monetize your
  content.
            So, if you’re shooting video, there are now
  websites and apps to help you sell it, right, instead of
  just throwing it out there on the Internet.  And as a
  brand, you go to those sources first before you try to
  just go on Twitter and find a video or on, you know,
  Google Images and download something, you’re going to go
  to a trusted agency, right, like a Getty or a Shutterstock
  or a VideoBlocks.
            So, one way to fix this potentially is just --
  is education around teaching creators, hey, when you make
  it, at the point of creation, the way you distribute it is
  very important and who you choose to carry it is going to
  be very important.
            MR. JESSOP:  I think the education point is
  critical.  I mean, both sort of capital E education and
  small E education.  I had somebody come to me and wanted
  to assign, I think it was 10 million ISRCs a year by
  making sure that every piece of music created in
  curricular education in the United States was given a
  code.  And we looked at it and thought this is fantastic,
  because we can get all of these kids to understand that
  unique identifiers are important.  And then we thought,
  actually, do we really want all these databases full of
  stuff which, you know, they’re going to listen to it
  themselves and then Mum’s going to listen to it and, uh,
  that’s it.
            So, you’ve got to look at the requirements.  And
  what are the requirements?  A lot of this user-generated
  content has no need for an open interruptible identifier
  because there’s no desire to monetize it; there’s no
  necessity to make it identifiable across platforms because
  it just sits on YouTube, and it is, and the little “share”
  button is just fine.
            For other purposes, though, you do need an
  interruptible identifier which lets you discover and link
  content, to go back to Mark’s terms, between YouTube and
  ASCAP and SoundExchange and the Library of Congress and
  everyone else in order to link together all the disparate
  sorts of data and different disparate sorts of experiences
  those different entities offer.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, I want to actually follow up on
  that in a second, but let me say that we’ll open it up to
  questions just in the next minute or two, so if you want
  to have questions, come up and line up.
            And folks on the phone, I actually don’t have
  the phone number that you dial into.  I don’t know that we
  -- if you want to ask a question and you didn’t hear the
  phone number earlier on the PTO webpage, or maybe we could
  put it up on the -- well, I don’t know if we can put it up
  on the screen -- but on the PTO webpage is a phone number
  that you can dial into if you want to remotely ask a
  question.
            So, if you have questions, kind of come line up,
  but let me come back to kind of not interrupt this
  conversation.  I mean, it sounds like -- I mean, I had
  kind of assumed coming into this panel that, you know, oh,
  you know, we would want to really encourage users to
  create identifiers, but it sounds like, in fact, that
  could be a -- you know, that maybe there’s a hesitation
  about that and there’s some downside risks.  And, so, I’m
  just interested in kind of the panel reacting to that
  question.
            MS. DAWSON:  I think given that the barriers to
  entry for media creation and distribution are now so low,
  basically anybody who wants to publish can and will and
  does.  So, at what point do you want to administer to
  that?  At what point, you know, does it make sense to
  identify every particle of creation that comes out on the
  web?  It really is needs-based.  It’s, you know, why do
  you need to do it, who’s doing it, what are they going to
  use this stuff for.  So, it comes down to use cases.
            MR. JESSOP:  Absolutely, it does.  And we’ve got
  to recognize that this isn’t free.  The cost --
            MS. DAWSON:  Not at all.
            MR. JESSOP:  The costs get smaller with scale;
  they get much smaller with scale.  They get much smaller
  with automation, but there’s still residual cost left. 
  And insisting that every piece of user-generated content
  have that cost imposed upon them when it brings them no
  benefit is absurd.  Asking people who have highly valued
  commercial content to bear some of the costs of running
  the system seems more reasonable.
            And as I think Mark said earlier, the costs are
  highly -- I don’t want to use the word “granular.”  We use
  that word to mean something else.  We have these
  overloaded words in this space.  The costs are applied in
  different proportions to different people, and not always
  in a way that relates to the value they get from it.
            The zip code system or the postal code system
  was developed by the Post Office or the Royal Mail or
  whoever did it, but who takes the benefit from it now? 
  Well, insurance companies doing insurance assessment;
  SATNAV companies driving your -- helping you drive your
  car.  All sorts of people get the benefit from something
  you didn’t bear the costs, and people are starting to say,
  should I subscribe, participate in this process to
  generate something that maybe other people get most of the
  benefit from, and that may be an obstacle to these things
  happening in a rational way.
            MR. DREWRY:  So, for the EIDR database, people
  use it because they trust it, and one of the reasons they
  trust it is we’re pretty picky about how much stuff we let
  in.  We sort of know what the people are doing, and
  opening it up to billions of bits of user-generated
  content will cause the level of general trust to just
  plummet, and then people will stop using it, and then that
  will be the end of that.
            So, we have to find some tradeoff between scale
  and trustability.  And the other thing is, although we
  have noncommercial users like the National Film Archives
  and national libraries and things like that, it’s
  primarily a commercial system.  It’s not -- it’s not about
  librarianship; it’s not about numbering the whole world. 
  It’s about numbering the things that are useful to number,
  and I think that’s really important to always keep in
  mind.  Everything could have a number, but not everything
  needs a number.
            MR. JESSOP:  Yeah, I’d agree with that
  completely.  I think it’s consistent with what I just
  said, but where libraries are curating content that’s been
  given a commercial number, I think it’s important that
  those numbers ripple through and are entered into the
  catalogs so that they do interoperate in a way that the
  future will allow library records and commercial records
  to be correlated.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, Hollis, do we have questions
  online?
            MS. ROBINSON:  Not yet, but we do have --
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay, so, sure, and can you
  identify yourself.
            MR. SIY:  Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge.  I was
  curious, one of the things that you were drawing
  distinction between, UGC and commercial works, was sort of
  the volume, the sophistication, but also one of the things
  is sort of the intent.  And one of the distinctions that
  might be drawn in the commercial space is sort of between
  published and unpublished or draft and finished product,
  right?
            When you’re publishing something, it’s not just
  making it commercial; it’s also saying, oh, this is done. 
  Just like, you know, the six John Morris cat videos a day,
  you might have a gazillion different drafts or edits or
  cuts.  So, is that a useful distinction?  Is that
  something that could be useful?
            MS. DAWSON:  It is until you sort of get into
  the concept of the updatable product.  And as we’re seeing
  more digital products, you know, being created, say
  somebody writes a book for O’Reilly Publishers about a
  computer programming language, well, those things tend to
  update very quickly, and a book, as we used to know it, is
  not necessarily the most useful form for expressing that
  kind of information.
            With ebooks, we see books getting updated and
  re-downloaded onto devices, and I had this happen to a
  memoir that I downloaded last year and then went back to
  reread it this year and it was different.  So, I don’t
  know if doneness is going to be that criteria, you know,
  in such a cut-and-dried way.
            MR. JESSOP:  But I think the distinction between
  unpublished and published -- and I defer to some awesome
  copyright lawyers in the front row here -- if it’s not
  published, there’s no real need for interoperation.  If
  it’s not published and nobody else knows about it, then
  you don’t need different data sources to interoperate
  because it’s not in any of them, because it’s -- unless
  it’s a catalog of a private archive or something, and I
  think those are museum and archive edge cases.
            We are dealing, I think, here with published
  works which exist in a variety of places and, therefore,
  we do need to worry about interoperation.
            MS. DAWSON:  I think a more useful distinction
  is ready or not ready.
            MR. BETEILLE:  Well, when you say published, do
  you mean published for commercial use or just published in
  general?
            MR. JESSOP:  No, just out there.
            MR. BETEILLE:  Got it.
            MR. JESSOP:  But if it’s still private and it’s
  sitting as a draft on your hard drive, who else needs to
  know about the metadata?  Well, maybe a historian in the
  future does; maybe your biographer does, but it’s not what
  we’re talking about today, I’d suggest.
            MR. SIY:  Like the example I was thinking of
  would be like a thesis.
            MR. JESSOP:  Right.  And it may be very
  important in the future to know what the drafts looked
  like, but that’s not the subject of identification of
  media.
            MR. MORRIS:  Next question?
            MR. GORDON:  Hi, I’m Jason Gordon from Winston &
  Strawn in Chicago, and my question is it seems like
  different media based on your background, whether it’s
  music or literature or movies, has a different set of
  identifiers.  And, so, my question is if a copyright hub
  in the United States is to be successful, is it simply
  importing existing identifiers that you already have into
  this overarching hub?  Or, instead, is it developing some
  sort of uniform system similar to international classes in
  the trademark regime?
            MR. JESSOP:  Well, let me take this first,
  because I take a little of the credit for putting
  MovieLabs and the digital object identifier people in the
  room, and they found an immediate marriage of great
  success.  There was a vision some years ago that all
  identifiers would migrate towards being different
  instances of a common scheme.  I don’t think that’s
  realistic to expect to put on a universal basis.  It’s an
  ambition.  It would be really nice if everybody could say
  that’s an identifier; I can deal in it in this standard
  way.  But in the reality of today’s world, there’s enough
  entrenched systems, enough money’s been spent to make that
  unlikely.
            I’d point out, though, that the ISBN, for
  instance, has a form where you can express it as a DOI. 
  It’s not universally applied, but you can do that.  So, I
  think, yes, we are looking at importing or associating the
  existing identifier schemes into a common tub where they
  can be -- and this comes back to one of the pieces of the
  index analysis -- name spaced.  If you know what -- the
  name space your identifier lives in, then you can say it’s
  different from all these other ones, and they may be
  pointing at different sorts, different classes of object.
            MS. DAWSON:  I also think that in a world of
  increasingly linked data it’s probably not going to -- you
  know, that enormous, giant system where everything is the
  same, it just isn’t practical in a linked-data approach
  where you’re linking two sets of identifiers is a little
  more viable.
            MR. DREWRY:  Right, it turns out that it’s
  probably almost certainly more economically tractable and
  easier for people to absorb if you just say we’re going to
  federate these things together using something from the
  Linked Content Coalition in a copyright hub and you give
  us an identifier and ideally its context and we’ll tell
  you about it, but maybe if you give us an identifier
  without a context we can still have a pretty good go at
  it.
            People often ask me is EIDR going to be the one
  video identifier, and the answer is absolutely not.  There
  -- you know, nobody will give up IMDB, right, it’s great
  for all sorts of stuff.  Nobody will give up their studio-
  internal greenlight numbers.  It’s just --
            MS. DAWSON:  There’s no one identifier to rule
  them all.
            MR. DREWRY:  Yeah, right.  So, the thing to do
  is to do what I think ISNI and the Copyright Hub and EIDR
  are doing, is to linking all these systems together in a
  relatively transparent way, and that’s -- and you get
  massive scale that way very quickly.
            MR. JESSOP:  But a point to the Linked Content
  Coalition recommendation, which is that you should be able
  to express it as a URI, which is the very basis of all the
  linking phrases, terms on the Internet, so that at least
  gives you some -- at least some degree of common basis.
            MR. MORRIS:  Okay.  Question?
            MR. CAPOBIANCO:  Hi, I’m Michael Capobianco of
  the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I
  wanted to ask do you think in the ebook world, in the
  self-published ebook world, one of the things that
  discourages people from using ISBNs is they are relatively
  expensive in small numbers.  And I’m sure that drives many
  away.
            MS. DAWSON:  Absolutely.
            MR. CAPOBIANCO:  And is there a way that that
  can be addressed?
            MS. DAWSON:  We have been trying.  David, as you
  know, I used to work for the US ISBN agency, and it’s been
  a struggle trying to -- trying to work out a cost model
  for self-published authors, and I could not agree with you
  more.  I think that problem does need to be solved to
  encourage more widespread adoption there.
            ISBNs are issued in a volume discount kind of
  way, and if you’re a small self-published author and
  you’ve got two books, it’s going to cost you $250 for your
  ISBNs or you buy a pack of 10 for, you know, however many. 
  That’s the model that they have chosen to work with, and
  until it changes, I think, yeah, it’s the other piece of
  that pressure on kind of seeing that self-published
  authors are not really using them.
            MR. JESSOP:  We kind of like this problem
  because it makes ISRC look really good value.
            MR. BETEILLE:  That’s true.  The other thing on
  the cost side of this whole equation is, so, there’s the
  cost of getting the identifier if you’re the creator.
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. BETEILLE:  But then if you want to access
  these identifiers in blocks or groups there’s costs to
  that, as well.
            MS. DAWSON:  Mm-hmm.
            MR. BETEILLE:  And, so, you know, transparency,
  I think, is a big issue, as well, like, yes, it’s great
  we’re assigning these, we’re getting the creators, but how
  do we -- how are we getting them to proliferate --
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. BETEILLE:  -- beyond just the creator
  proliferating them as they produce their content and
  distribute it?
            MR. JESSOP:  Well, maybe just drawing a veil
  over exactly how they are diffused, I think as the
  librarians like to call it, I don’t think any of the
  identifiers that have registries, have databases, make a
  charge for access to the data.  I think that’s right. 
  Somebody going to be the counter example?
            AUDIENCE MEMBER (Off mic):  ISAN.
            MR. JESSOP:  ISAN.  Beg ISAN’s pardon.
            But many of the identifiers you can look up for
  free.  And I think the mental equation that’s gone on is
  that these are more valuable if you can look them up, and
  using them in creating barriers at that point will simply
  deter adoption.
            MR. BETEILLE:  So, I totally get that the lookup
  exists, but if we’re looking at scale, imagine -- now,
  forget about Google and YouTube for a second -- another
  entity that wanted to get as many identifiers and tie it
  to as many pieces of content and then distributing as
  possible, the scalability of getting that information is
  not always just free and transparent.
            MR. MORRIS:  Raymond, do you want to --
            MR. DREWRY:  So, the EIDR model is a little
  different.  We have member companies.  Once you’re a
  member, you can register however much you want.  And, you
  know, we don’t care.  We actually like it if you register
  more.
            Now, that leaves -- since our sort of buy-in
  cost is $1,000, that leaves really small video producers
  in the lurch, but we’ve created a small cottage industry
  of people who are EIDR members who then register things
  for people, and they do whatever cost structure their
  particular segment will bear, so we’ve managed to get --
  managed to maintain a thing that works for the big
  companies without completely freezing out the little guys,
  as well.
            But I won’t say it’s an easy balancing act to
  manage.  It’s actually incredibly painful --
            MS. DAWSON:  Right.
            MR. DREWRY:  -- at the end of every year. 
            MS. DAWSON:  I know that Bowker has looked at
  that type of thing of creating or working with other
  organizations who would essentially serve as service
  bureaus for self-published authors.  It does also affect
  the value of the information that Bowker collects because
  they’re not getting that information from the self-
  published authors.  So, you know, their counts are off,
  and that’s a problem.
            MR. MORRIS:  Paul, very quickly?
            MR. JESSOP:  Yeah, to Fred’s point, it was a few
  years ago somebody said at a music conference that the
  focus has moved from MP3 to API.  And having machine-to-
  machine access to some of this data is critical for some
  applications, and that’s certainly not there yet in all
  cases.
            MR. MORRIS:  So, let me check, are there any
  questions on the phone?  Okay, no, okay.
            So, just really a minute and a half at most. 
  So, very quick answers, but kind of to jump to the rest of
  the conference, let me kind of give you an opportunity of
  kind of answering one of the key questions being asked is,
  you know, do you think that the government could make a
  contribution here.  And just, you know, very quickly, and
  it could be no, yes, no clue, or tell us what to do.
            MS. DAWSON:  Absolutely.  In most countries, the
  ISBN agencies are run by the national libraries.  In the
  US and the UK, they are not.
            MR. JESSOP:  Encouragement is good.  National
  solutions are part of the problem; they’re not part of the
  solution.
            MR. DREWRY:  Encouragement is good, but I’m
  going to defer any more answer to my colleagues at the
  NPAA.
            MR. HOLLAND:  I think the future is user-
  generated content, and that’s going to be on a scale
  that’s so big the government wouldn’t be able to handle
  it.  So, it would be private sector then.
            MR. BETEILLE:  The short answer is yes, but I
  think it’s a private/public collaboration.
            MR. MORRIS:  All right, great.  Well, this has
  been, I think, a fascinating panel.  And, so, let’s say
  thanks to the panel.
            (Applause).
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you all so much.  And we
  now have a 15-minute coffee break.  If you go out the
  door, turn to your left; walk down the corridor; you’ll
  find coffee.  And we are starting back again at 11:00. 
  Thanks so much.
            (Recess).
                       THE PATH FORWARD:
           INTEROPERABILITY OF STANDARD IDENTIFIERS
    AND INCORPORATION INTO DATABASES OF RIGHTS INFORMATION
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Can everyone please take their
  seats?  The panelists can go up to the dais, I guess it’s
  called.  I don’t know what you call it.  Anyhow, I want to
  start our next panel.  The next topic, which is The Path
  Forward:  Interoperability of Standard Identifiers and
  Incorporation into Databases of Rights Information, is
  broken into two panels.  The first panel will be about
  just music; and the next panel will be about the rest of
  the other genres or subject matters.
            And we are going to begin the music panel by --
  with Jacqueline Charlesworth making a presentation about
  the recent Copyright Office Music Marketplace Report.  The
  focus -- the part of the report, the report is very
  comprehensive and broad.  And Jacqueline, here today, is
  going to focus on just the portions that deal with the
  creation of a database and standard identifiers.  And I am
  very happy to introduce Jacqueline Charlesworth, the
  Register of the -- General Counsel at the Copyright --
  everyone’s looking -- yes, and the Associate Register and
  General Counsel of the Copyright Office.  So, I’m very
  pleased that she’s here today to give us a brief overview. 
  Thank you so much.
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  Hello, everyone.  And thank
  you for having me here.  Music -- I think singling out
  music for a special hour is perfectly a good thing to do
  because in my years of experience in the music industry,
  there have been a lot of efforts to solve data problems. 
  There’s been a lot of progress, but we’re still not there. 
  And in my opinion, and I think this is shared by a lot in
  the music community, if you could solve some of these
  problems we would greatly enhance the music marketplace.
            For those of you who don’t know -- I think most
  of you do know -- the Copyright Office just issued and
  described it in a comprehensive report on music, the music
  marketplace, in particular, government regulation and
  ways that government might incentivize or enact different
  and better, more efficient licensing regimes.  So, as part
  of that, this is the study here, it’s available on our
  website.  For those of you who have trouble falling asleep
  at night, you can break it out.  It’s 243 pages long.
            And, you know, this is a chart that’s a little
  hard to see here in the way it was reproduced, but this
  shows some of the complexity of our current licensing
  framework.  And when you just even glance at that for a
  moment or any version of that, you realize that it’s
  essential to have good data if we’re going to have a well-
  functioning music market.
            Just very generally, we looked at, as I
  mentioned, a bunch of different issues in the report. 
  They involve fair compensation for creators, licensing
  parity.  We have different regimes for different -- you
  know, for sound recordings versus musical works.  We have
  different rate setting standards.  There’s issues with the
  consent decrees -- the antitrust consent decrees that
  govern the public -- or performance rights organizations
  that have come under scrutiny.
            We looked at the Section 115 license, over 100
  years old, the licenses for sound recordings, particularly
  the digital performance of sound recordings.  And then at
  the end of the report, and it hasn’t been as much of the
  focus of some of the media attention, but in some sense,
  as I said, I think it’s the most important issue or
  issues, the data issues and transparency for creators in
  terms of tracing their works and figuring out how to get
  paid.  And, so, those are the issues I’m going to be
  addressing briefly today to give you sort of a summary of
  our findings.
            Just quickly, the process basically lasted a
  year and started lasted year in March.  We solicited
  written comments, including on data issues.  We had a
  series of public hearings.  We actually asked for more
  comments, again on data issues, and we got some very
  helpful submissions, particularly from the PROs.
            A group of students at Belmont University in
  Nashville actually did a great job in their comments. 
  They went around and actually interviewed people in the
  industry and gave us very good information about what
  standards are in common use.  And then we released our
  report last February.
            Okay, so, and some of this won’t be new to
  anyone who’s been in this space, but just quickly the
  challenges that we’re facing, you know, digital services,
  a service like Spotify, you know, who really want to offer
  across-the-board content, they’re dealing with, you know,
  tens of millions of tracks.  And we have -- we don’t have
  a centralized database.  We don’t have an authoritative
  database.
            We have pockets of data -- substantial pockets
  of data housed in different organizations, which is very
  valuable, but we don’t have anything that ties it all
  together.  There are some common identifiers.  I’ll talk
  more about them in a moment:  the ISRC, ISWC, and ISNI. 
  And I think you’ve heard something about them already
  today.  They’re used inconsistently.  They’re not
  necessarily tied together.
            We have services.  Some are very good and
  understand the value of using identifiers.  Some are
  resistant to, for example, including standardized
  identifiers in their reporting back on usage.
            We’ve had, as I mentioned, some notable efforts
  by some organizations, and without limiting the people who
  have been working on this, SoundExchange, Harry Fox,
  ASCAP/BMI, and SOCAN have a new initiative called
  MusicMark where they’re trying to rationalize their data. 
  So, there’s been a lot of effort in this area and,
  frankly, some progress, but it’s really not enough.
            And most -- you know, when you hear from digital
  services, and we will be hearing from some of them, I
  think, on the panel, what you hear is this is incredibly
  frustrating, particularly the mechanical licensing, which
  is a song-by-song system and requires you to identify the
  owners of the musical work, and often, as anyone in the
  music industry knows, you have multiple owners, and they
  may be represented or often represented by different
  publishers and parties.  So, it’s a very, very complicated
  set of data issues.
            So, just quickly, some of the common standards,
  I mentioned ISRC, that’s for the sound recordings; ISWC
  identifies musical works; ISNI, I think we heard a little
  bit about that, that’s a code that identifies individual
  creators; also commonly used, UPC, which is the bar code
  that’s used on individual music products; DDEX is a
  standardized messaging format that’s used in the industry
  to send information or metadata around; and, of course,
  you have the copyright registration number which
  identifies the work as it was registered with the
  Copyright Office, both the sound recording or a musical --
  and a musical work.
            So, the ISRC, a little bit more on that. 
  Originally adopted in 1986, and the current version was
  adopted in 2001.  It came into -- basically the way --
  when it was first adopted, it wasn’t given out in a
  centralized way.  It still really isn’t, which is a
  problem.  Basically record labels or record companies, you
  know, got batches of ISRC codes and assigned them.  And it
  wasn’t highly systematized.
            And, so, when iTunes started requiring it, that
  has sort of driven -- I think there’s much more interest
  in using it and getting it right.  And SoundExchange is
  also, I know, is, you know, and we’ll hear more about
  that, has embarked on an initiative to really try and
  gather ISRC data.  I think, what do you have, like 15
  million titles now?  Which is a lot.  And kind of create a
  centralized repository for all this data that had been
  kind of individually housed at record labels.
            The code contained tells you want country, the
  country of the registrant; the year of the issuance of the
  code; and a designation number for the sound recording. 
  Ultimately, IFPI, which is the International Federation of
  -- what does that stand for -- Phonographic -- what’s the
  I for, Shira?  Okay, yeah, IFPI.  I always just call it
  IFPI, but it’s the international RIAA.  We’ll think of it
  that way.  It is responsible for issuing the numbers, and
  they appoint national agencies.  So, here in the US,
  that’s the RIAA.
            Inconsistent metadata, as I mentioned, is a
  problem here.  In other words, because of the way those
  codes were issued, there was no sort of standardization or
  systematization in terms of what -- what was collected
  around the code.  So, IFPI, I understand to be working on
  that, that particular issue.
            So, basically, with the ISRC, you have --
  there’s a lot there to work with.  It needs to be cleaned
  up; it needs to be centralized, and there are people
  working on that, which is a good thing.
            ISWC, this identifies the musical work.  It was
  first assigned in 1995.  We know that “Dancing Queen” was
  the first official ISWC-labeled title.  Over 18 million
  songs have been registered.  This is -- it’s overseen by
  CISAC, which is an international organization, and it
  appoints -- CISAC in turn appoints, you know, regional and
  national agencies.  Here in the US, that’s an agency
  called SongCode, which is owned by ASCAP.
            And this -- here, the standard is a little more
  systematized in terms of the metadata.  You’re required to
  identify all of the authors of a musical work in order to
  get the code, which slows it down but also is a positive
  thing because you have more complete data attached to the
  code.  And you can see the code there, it has a prefix, T. 
  I think the only existing prefix is T.  For some reason
  that stands for musical work.  I have no idea why.  The
  work identifier and then there’s like a checksum, which
  is a way to try and control errors.
            And then ISNI, which is a new standard, first
  published in 2012.  It’s considered to be a bridge
  standard which can link different existing systems
  together, for example, the PROs in the United States use
  something called IPIs often to identify individual authors
  and, you know, the idea is to link that metadata to one
  single number to identify an individual.
            And this is important because you have, you
  know, different spellings; you have -- obviously people
  can have the same name; people can have different
  capacities; they may be an author and a musician; they may
  -- you know, and someone, you know, in the olden days,
  like at Harry Fox, they used to keep the stuff on cards,
  right, and so some people would say, you know, Carnes-
  comma-R; some would say Rick Carnes.  Is your name
  Richard?  I don’t know.  No, okay, never Richard
  hopefully.  But, you know, mistakes were made; there were
  misspellings.  So, this is a way to uniquely identify
  individual creators, and it’s not limited to music.
            So, I mentioned some of these already.  I mean,
  we do have some limitations in terms of the current --
  these three key standards.  Again, the lack of a central
  database, although I think for ISRC, which again,
  SoundExchange working on that; ISWC, there is some lag
  time in terms of getting it assigned, so if you’re issuing
  a new track, you may not have the ISWC available.  That’s
  something that I think needs to be addressed so we can get
  the ISWCs more quickly into the system.  And big issue,
  ISRCs not linked to ISWCs in many cases.
            So, in the music industry, if you’re a digital
  service and you have your 30 million tracks, how nice
  would it be if you had the ISRCs for those to just run
  them through and find out what the musical work was and
  attach it to the musical work owners, meaning the ISWC. 
  That matching data is very elusive.  Again, this is
  something people have been working on.  I think Harry Fox
  has made a lot of progress on this and some other
  licensing organizations and licensees themselves.
            But, you know, it’s very hard if you’re a
  service and what you’re -- you know, the record label 
  is sending you digital files of tracks and they may have
  an ISRC in them, but they’re probably not going to give
  you -- traditionally, they don’t give you the ISWC or
  information about the musical work.  And, so, one really
  important goal that we recommend in the report is to
  develop a comprehensive matching database so that this
  could be a much more seamless process.
            Again, ISNI is relatively new.  It’s not in wide
  use, but it has been embraced by ASCAP and BMI, so I think
  we’re moving toward that standard, and it’s a good thing. 
  I think it’s a fairly easy system that’s an open database. 
  You can go online and look people up.
            And then general -- you know, there’s --
  obviously there are issues, and I think a lot of these
  came up in the earlier panel.  Metadata can be stripped;
  there are -- you know, a lot of people are starting to
  develop technologies where, you know, you have a
  fingerprint or something intrinsic to the file that can’t
  be easily stripped.  But even if you have that identifier
  of a digital file, say a music file, you still need to
  attach that to metadata.  And, of course, the metadata
  changes over time as people buy and sell catalogs and, you
  know, particularly songs.
            You know, the ownership changes, and so you
  still have to have a centralized basically database or
  resource so that you can -- when you have your file if
  you’ve identified it you can attach -- match it to the
  owners and pay them or report to them or whatever it is,
  take a license, whatever it is you need to do.
            And then self-represented creators.  This is --
  I think I heard a little bit about this in this ISBN
  situation.  I mean, more and more, people are producing
  their own tracks.  They’re able to upload them into
  services.  Sometimes they’re doing it through a third
  party, but we need to make these systems and the ability
  to get an ISRC and an ISWC accessible to individuals.
            And that is something that I think is -- I 
  don’t see why that’s not -- I understand there are
  economics, but it seems like that should be doable,
  especially if you have third -- sometimes you might need
  third-party organizations to help, but it’s a very
  important piece of this, particularly in the music space
  where, you know, authors or creators are no longer
  necessarily relying on intermediaries, record labels and
  publishers who traditionally handled all this information
  for them.
            So, in our report, we really -- although it
  would be nice to start from scratch and invent a new
  system, that’s not -- we sort of took the world as we
  found it.  I think someone said this earlier on the
  previous panel, there’s a lot of investment in what we
  have today.  We want to capitalize on that.  We want to
  leverage the sort of existing statutory licensing regime
  to kind of connect that to supplying data to a central
  repository.
            And you can read more about this in the report,
  but basically we’re proposing a centralized general music
  rights organization that would collect this data.  And it
  would be supplied by music rights organizations who were
  licensing, and if people wanted to license directly, in
  other words opt out of a statutory license regime, they
  would also have to supply their data, and by data, I mean
  over time the ISRC, ISWC, you know, as appropriate, who
  represent what and in what share and where to get a
  license.  And, so, the idea is to create a publicly
  accessible resource with authoritative data and to --
  again, to use some of our existing systems to facilitate
  that.
            Well, I mentioned the publishers who opted out. 
  It’s very important that publishers who are doing -- to
  the extent that they choose to opt out of a system, if
  that’s allowed in the future, that’s a big issue with the
  consent decrees, that they supply data so that people know
  where to go for a license.
            On the service side, assuming that identifiers
  were in the database, we recommend that they be reported
  back.  In other words, it’s a two-sided equation.  The
  services need to supply identifiers back.  I think some
  services have been good about this, others not so good. 
  But everyone really needs to work together so that you
  have the data going back and forth.
            We think that although we’re recommending these
  three key identifiers to start with that what would really
  work best here is to have this -- the issues and sort of
  what’s appropriate revisited by regulation, not hardwired
  into the statute necessarily, but obviously technologies
  change, new things come into the marketplace.  It’s
  important to have some flexibility in terms of the
  government role in this in sort of setting standards and
  what the criteria would be to report the information to
  the centralized organization.
            And, you know, you couldn’t enact it in 24
  hours.  It would need to phased in over time.  There would
  need to be some, I think, financial incentives for
  compliance.  Obviously the biggest incentive is getting
  paid quickly and efficiently, but if you read our report,
  you’ll see that, you know, to support the GMRO we’re
  proposing that licensees would share or would pay a
  surcharge to use -- to make use of that system in the
  sense of being able to report under the statutory licenses
  and take advantage of that database.
            If the music rights organizations who are
  representing the rights owners didn’t comply with the data
  targets, they would be required to share in that
  administrative cost.  In other words, I think money -- a
  lot of times I think there’s a lot of goodwill, there’s a
  lot of interest in solving this problem, but money is the
  key incentive here, and you kind of need to tie the data
  on some level to the payment system.  Or it will be, I
  think, very difficult to achieve.  And, so, that’s -- a
  lot of the focus of the report was kind of figuring out a
  fair and reasonable way to do that that didn’t overburden
  either side but still would result in a comprehensive
  database in a reasonable period of time.
            And then the GMRO would be tasked with the
  substantial task of developing data to match sound
  recordings with musical works.  And here is a depiction. 
  When I looked at this, I think John Riley did this chart
  for me.  I was like I see a crown there with data as the
  jewel of the crown.  I think that was an accident, but
  that is how I see this.  And I hope we can get there
  someday.  So, thank you very much for listening.
            (Applause).
                       THE MUSIC SECTOR
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you so much, Jacqueline. 
  I don’t know, can you all hear me?  Thank you so much,
  Jacqueline.  That was great.
            So, now I am going to ask each of my
  distinguished panelists if they could run down the aisle
  and introduce themselves briefly in like 30 seconds or so
  and why this issue is important to you.  And we’ll start
  with you.
            MR. PRENDERGAST:  Thank you.  My name is Brad
  Prendergast.  I work at SoundExchange.  SoundExchange is
  the nonprofit collective, as Jacqueline mentioned, that
  handles the collection and distribution of royalties for
  the performance of sound recordings over Internet and
  satellite radio, digital transmissions.  And as a result
  of that statutory license, we collect data, we collect
  royalties from thousands of different Internet radio
  services and satellite radio, as well.
            And the data comes in in a nonstandardized way
  from these services.  As was mentioned, artists’ names,
  track titles, album titles, even label names can be
  reported in different ways.  And, so, we are -- we spend a
  lot of time and resources trying to clean that data, and
  it consumes resources and money that could be allocated to
  artists and labels.  So, anything that we can do to
  improve the flow of data will also improve the flow of
  money, and that’s critically important to us at
  SoundExchange.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  Hi, I’m Mark Isherwood.  I’m the
  Secretariat at DDEX or one of them.  And DDEX is a
  standards organization again, which has as its members
  digital retailers, technology providers, music publishers,
  record companies, music rights societies.  And we develop
  standard message formats for communicating data, whether
  it be identifiers or the metadata associated with them
  and, indeed, a lot more metadata about elements of the
  music supply chain.
            One thing in particular that is relevant to
  today’s conversation that we’re working on with our
  publisher and record company and digital retailer members
  is standardizing messages for the mechanical licensing of
  musical works in the US because of some of the problems
  that Jacqueline mentioned.
            The other thing that may also be relevant as far
  as I’m personally concerned is until about a year ago I
  was Chair of the GRD Working Group, which was the group of
  companies seeking to develop a global repertoire database,
  and this was not the one that was sponsored by WIPO but
  was an industry initiative and sadly failed, but the idea,
  happily, continues in other forms.
            MR. CARNES:  Yes, my name is Rick Carnes and I’m
  President of the Songwriters Guild of America and also Co-
  Chair of the Music Creators North America.  And in that
  regard, we actually participated in the GRD, which, as
  he’s saying, is still going on.  Basically, the
  Songwriters Guild represents only songwriters, and we
  create the songs which create the data problems, which is
  the reason we’re here today, so...
            MR. KNIFE:  Hi, I’m Lee Knife.  I’m the
  Executive Director of the Digital Media Association, a
  nonprofit trade organization in Washington that represents
  many consumer-facing digital media companies that
  distribute millions and millions of songs instantly if you
  want them.
            This issue is hugely important to us, to all of
  our members, and indeed we’ve been involved in multiple
  attempts to try to address the data issues as they relate
  to the commerce for songs and for the recordings of those
  songs.  And, so, we’re always interested in this and happy
  to participate.
            MR. RUSSELL:  Maurice Russell, Senior Vice
  President of Client Services at the Harry Fox Agency, HFA. 
  HFA is the largest mechanical rights agency in the US.  We
  issue more licenses in this space than any other company. 
  We represent over 48,000 music publishers in the US.  In
  our traditional business, we issue mechanical licenses on
  their behalf, collect and account to them.  In recent
  years, partly out of issues arising from data, we have
  been engaged through our slingshot administration services
  solution to offer full-service mechanical licensing to
  many large distributors throughout the space.
            And one of the key issues that we have to deal
  with is bridging the gap between the sound recording world
  and the publishing community, because as Jacqueline has
  just pointed out, they don’t speak the same language, so
  unique identifiers are very key for us to try to bridge
  that gap.  Unfortunately, we have one, which is the ISRC,
  and we would like to see others, as well, so this is a
  very important discussion for us.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.  So, now I am going
  to begin with a few questions about the Copyright Office
  recommendation.  And these guys are really, really good
  and such experts on this that they could each talk for
  more time than we have just in response to this question,
  so I’m going to limit their answers to four minutes, and
  I’m going to be a taskmaster here.
            So, the questions are what are your views on the
  Copyright Office proposal for GMRO that would establish a
  comprehensive musical composition and recording database
  that incorporates standard identifiers?  Then, if you have
  concerns, how would you propose addressing them?  And are
  there alternative approaches that you would prefer or
  issues that still need to be resolved?  And, finally, to
  what extent would each of your suggested alternatives or
  outstanding issues require government regulation or
  oversight?
            So, if you all can -- we can go down the row and
  you’ll each have four minutes.
            MR. PRENDERGAST:  I’ll pass.  No, I’m just
  kidding.
            (Laughter).
            MR. PRENDERGAST:  I think the best parts about
  this Copyright Office study -- a couple highlight points. 
  One is the report itself is just a great primer on the
  issues of music licensing.  And anybody at any level,
  whether it’s college, law school, or in a career should
  read at least the first few sections of just to really get
  a holistic view of the problems that these industries
  face.
            And the other great thing about the report is
  that it’s ambitious and it proposes ideas and waits to see
  how the industry can react to those proposals.  And, so it
  dreams big.
            I’ll talk a little bit about the specific
  problems that SoundExchange is trying to resolve.  As I
  mentioned earlier, we collect a lot of data from a lot of
  sources.  Sometimes that data is incomplete.  Sometimes
  it’s incorrect.  And sometimes it just differs from one
  service to the other.  And, historically, we use the data
  that we receive from Internet radio services to help us
  identify who we should pay.
            In the last few years, we’ve been working on our
  own repertoire database and our own rights ownership
  database that would be more authoritative in determining
  who we should pay.  So, instead of using the services’
  playlist reports to us to identify who to pay, we simply
  use it to identify what tracks the services actually
  performed.  That’s an important distinction.  Once we know
  what tracks have been performed, then we can use our
  databases to determine who we should actually pay.
            Well, where does the data come from in our
  databases?  It comes from the labels themselves.  It comes
  from major labels, independent labels.  It comes from
  aggregators such as the Orchard.  And all of this data is
  commerce-tested.  As Jacqueline mentioned, ISRCs really
  took off when Apple started to require them for the iTunes
  store.  And, so, this data has been tested in commerce;
  it’s reliable; and we’re getting it from authoritative
  sources.
            The other thing, too, is that the data that we
  get is often -- is in real time.  As Mark mentioned, we
  receive -- with the DDEX standards, we receive the data
  from these labels via the DDEX ERN standard.  And, so,
  we’re getting -- we’re getting realtime information.  What
  we do with that data in terms of whether the GMRO makes
  sense, we haven’t thought about that yet.
            And we’ve been busy just populating the
  database.  We have 14, 15 million different unique ISRCs
  in that database.  We still haven’t thought through, you
  know, how to leverage that in ways other than simply to
  solve the one problem that prompted us to design the
  database in the first place, which is to be able to pay
  people efficiently and authoritatively.  There’s still a
  lot of issues for us to work out in that regard.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  Thank you.  Being the only Brit
  on this panel, I have to confess to being not as
  intimately aware of the Copyright report as perhaps I
  should be for this panel, but I do -- I did read the
  executive summary and clearly listened to what Jacqueline
  had to say.
            I always in this area get a little nervous about
  the concept that somehow one thing will solve all these
  problems.  There are several problems to be solved, and in
  some ways, each of them needs to be taken as a bite-sized
  chunk and solved and then has to work interoperably with
  the solutions to the other chunks.
            So, identity, which is what we’ve been talking
  about today, identifying a thing or a person, as Mark very
  capably explained this morning, is one thing.  Identifying
  who owns it is another thing altogether.  Identifying
  contracts relating to that thing between two people or two
  organizations is another thing altogether.
            So, I think the key around this is making sure
  that any effort of this nature fits with what already
  exists in terms of other forms of standards.  And I think
  in that regard, where government, not just here, but
  anywhere else, has a very vital role is to get all the
  right people in the room at the same time with a proper
  willingness to actually look to resolve some of these
  issues.
            My experience with GRD was that for some of the
  people that were slightly reluctant to be there, there was
  always the backstop of the fact that the European
  Commission had said this is something they’d like to see
  done, albeit that this particular project failed, you
  know, having that backstop there, somebody, if you like,
  in the back of the room with a sharp, sharp thing to prod
  people every now and then was very helpful.
            But it is vital that all of the different
  sectors of the industry are involved, and I think one of
  the problems that the industry has at the moment is too
  many of these conversations go on within sectors.  So,
  ISRC will be talked about within the record industry, and
  they won’t necessarily talk to other sectors and other
  people in their supply chain who have an interest in ISRC
  working properly; similarly, the societies and ISWC
  societies not talking to the music publishers about some
  of the data activities that they do, and then at the end
  the poor retailers have to deal with all the crud that is
  created as a result of that lack of communication.
            And I think one of the reasons I think DDEX has
  been successful is because we do have representatives from
  all of those sectors in the room at the same time.  We
  don’t have every representative from every sector, but we
  do believe that makes a difference.  And it does create an
  environment where some of the politics and the commercial
  issues get left at the door and you’re just left with IT
  and operational people trying to solve problems amongst
  each other.  And I think any initiative by anybody in this
  area has to be done on that basis.
            And with that in mind, DDEX is actually
  sponsoring a summit at the end of this month where we’re
  looking at whether there are ways in actually trying to
  bring some of these threads together and if anybody would
  be -- is in London around the end of April and would like
  to attend, please come and see me afterwards.  But, I
  think, you know, my two things are government can very
  much prod and, if necessary, bully, but also there have to
  be a full representation from across all the sectors,
  because all of these things affect everybody, not just one
  individual sector.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.
            MR. CARNES:  Good.  We have four minutes, is
  that it?
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Yes.
            MR. CARNES:  As a songwriter, I’m only good for
  like three minutes and 15 seconds.
            (Laughter).
            MR. CARNES:  Basically, as a songwriter and as I
  said, we create the songs that create the problems.  And
  the solutions for the problems are, you know, rely on the
  data being clean, being updated, and relating directly
  back to the creator, because a copyright is life plus 70,
  right?  So, if you talk about copyright owners, which, you
  know, Jacqueline was talking copyright owners, too often
  people consider that to be music publishers, or in the
  case of recordings, the record labels.
            Actually, the copyright owner is the creator of
  the copyright.  So, in every instance where we’re talking
  about relating something back, this data identifier needs
  to have this information in this file and everybody needs
  to be able to search it.  You ought to be able to find the
  creator.  You know, it’s one thing to find the work; it’s
  another thing for the money to actually get back to the
  creator.
            And the system we have right now is incredibly
  complex and was grown up over 100 years where we got the
  ISRC, ISWC, all these -- all these numbers and all these
  data formats happened along the lines, over the years, and
  now we’re looking at a completely different environment in
  which, as they say in the financial services, complexity
  is fraud, okay?  When something becomes so complex that a
  songwriter cannot look at it and understand where their
  money comes from, we lose our transparency.  It’s one
  thing to be in a situation where they say you have the
  right to audit; it’s another thing for us to go in and
  audit.
            And what we’re looking at is data formats where
  we can’t find our money, okay?  Not just the services
  can’t find out who to, you know, attribute something to;
  we can’t find the data.  And if we set up a GMRO, which I
  think is, you know, a laudable idea, on that GRO we need
  to have songwriters on the board of governance.  We need
  to have songwriters in the dispute resolution committees. 
  We need to be able to have transparency that we can
  enforce, and the data formats are the first step to that. 
  And then the second step is who’s minding the store, okay? 
  So...
            MR. KNIFE:  Okay, so, I am going to try to
  address some of the questions.  I probably won’t get to
  all of them.  First of all, certainly, the Copyright
  Office’s report which calls for a series of databases,
  including this kind of the backstop is the way I think of
  it, the GMRO, is extremely laudable because that’s -- you
  know, a significant problem that we have right now is not
  only do we have all these different data sets in different
  areas, depending on whether it’s a performing rights
  organization or it’s a mechanical licensing organization
  or it’s a master recording owner, there’s also gaps within
  all of those -- within each of those areas there’s a gap,
  right?  So, to have this kind of backstop, to have a GMRO
  where anybody could make sure that they are completely
  licensed is a wonderful idea.
            Some of the concerns that we have, you know,
  aside from the report -- some of the assumptions about
  exactly who has the data or who has the best data, who
  benefits from that data and using it and who has to pay
  for it and how they have to pay for it.  Some of the other
  concerns, and with all due respect to Jacqueline and the
  Office, one of the concerns is at least in the short term
  the report recommends looking at the existing databases
  that we’re talking about, right?
            The siloed databases between performing rights
  organizations on one hand, mechanical licensing on the
  other, master recording owners on another, and it kind of
  wishes for interoperability between them, which thus far
  there have been many attempts to do that, and they have
  failed.  I understand that the report kind of goes another
  step further and attempts to incentivize that even
  greater, but that’s still an area of concern, because thus
  far these individual fiefdoms of data about these
  disparate rights that are associated with musical works
  and the recordings that embody them have thus far not
  really been very cooperative with each other.
            I think the report might go further in terms of
  generating those incentives, right, because we’ve seen
  those failures thus far.  And, unfortunately, I think that
  might include what some might consider applying
  disincentives, right, for nonparticipation.  I don’t know
  exactly what those would be.
            Obviously, we have treaty limitations.  There
  are only so many kind of obligations that we can apply to
  actually acquiring copyright registration, but I think as
  Mark was kind of saying, a sharp pointy stick at the backs
  of the people that are walking this plank of making sure
  that this data is complete and interoperable and readable
  across all these sources is an important motivator.
            MR. RUSSELL:  Hi.  I’d like to thank Jacqueline
  and the Copyright Office.  We think that there are a lot
  of very progressive ideas.  There are obviously a lot of
  moving parts to finding a solution to how to handle data
  and licensing in this space, specifically with regard to
  the GMRO.  It is similar to proposals that were made under
  the 2006 SIRA legislation, which would have created
  similar centralized collective licensing.  And it was
  something that we supported.
            One concern that we do have is, as I mentioned
  earlier, one of our biggest challenges is bridging the gap
  between two worlds -- the sound recording community and
  the publishing community.  And we really -- we take in
  data from both sides.  We get authoritative data from
  publishers, and we get licensing requests and other data
  from sound recording companies, and we match them and we
  create a link between those two things and we use that
  link in the future to license and to pay royalties.
            It’s very important for us to know that they are
  invested in continuing to send us clean data.  So, the
  incentives, when you move that problem from the front end
  by alleviating their infringement liability is
  significant, because though we’re able on a usage
  perspective to license 80 or 90 percent of the usage in the
  subscription streaming space, there still remains a 
  part of the market that is very difficult to match.  And
  that -- we wouldn’t want to see that fall off and those
  rights holders be disadvantaged.
            Specifically with regard to unique identifiers,
  as I said earlier, ISRC is the one that we get.  We would
  like to see more.  There’s some realities about dealing
  with unique identifiers in diverse communities.  We have a
  one-to-many relationship on both sides -- licensees who
  are small, medium, and large and sophisticated and have
  resources and those who don’t, and we have the same thing
  on the publishing side.  So, being able to ensure that
  they’re able to actually ingest and manage these
  identifiers and supply them on a timely basis is really
  important.
            In the music industry, a lot of things happen
  backwards.  The sound recording is created while the
  publishing is still being worked out, and it gets released
  to the market and people want licenses, and it’s not
  available.
            So, we would hate to see that get pushed to the
  background to be resolved with -- sorry -- with a blanket
  license.  Excuse me, I totally blanked out because I’ve
  got so many things going on.  Yes, yes, there are many --
  there are many points to be made.  But the reality is that
  in many cases we don’t, even though we ingest unique
  identifiers like ISWC, we don’t have those -- those are
  usually not in use in the US, so, we don’t really have
  actionable data on that side.
            So basically I guess what I’m saying is if you
  don’t have the right unique identifiers in the right place
  at the time that you need to make critical transactions,
  they’re not going to help you.  And I think that that’s
  also a very key issue.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you, thank you.
            So, now I have a more targeted specific
  question.  This one’s for Brad and for Maurice, too.  As
  you saw, the report, both of your organizations would dump
  your data into the GMRO.  So, my question is would your
  organizations be willing to provide your data to a GMRO
  database as recommended.
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  Can I just come over?  This
  is why I’m here.  Yeah, so, I just want to clarify that
  we’re not saying that any organization, a PRO or a Harry
  Fox would transmit all of their data to -- or dump it, as
  you put it so eloquently.
            (Laughter).
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  We’re saying certain pieces
  of data, the standard identifiers --
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Right.
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  -- who is representing, but
  not necessarily -- we’re not talking about the names and
  addresses of royalty recipients.  We’re not talking about
  all data.  We’re talking about enough that would -- you
  know, where you could -- so you could look up, find out
  who represented what and where to go for a license.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Right.
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  And the identifiers that
  would match -- ultimately match musical works to sound
  recordings and creators.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Yes.
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  So, I just wanted to clarify
  that.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Sorry.
            MR. PRENDERGAST:  Well, I’ll field the question. 
  The short answer is we don’t know.  There is an important
  distinction to make that Jacqueline’s comments just
  raised.  When it comes to the usefulness of a database, we
  have to keep in mind two different principles.  One is the
  repertoire metadata associated with the track; and the
  other is the rights ownership information.  The repertoire
  metadata, it’s the track title, the names of the
  performing artists in the case of sound recordings.  These
  data fields are -- don’t change.  They’re fixed from the
  beginning.  And they may not be knowable, but once they’re
  known, that data can be inserted and that stays the way it
  is.
            On the other hand, you have the rights ownership
  information, which can change.  Catalogs are bought and
  sold all the time.  So, one challenge that we face as
  we’re building our databases is to keep those concepts
  distinct.  And when it comes time to -- we haven’t yet had
  a chance to think about how we’re going to leverage this
  data.  Right now, as I mentioned at the beginning, we’ve
  only designed these databases with solving one problem in
  mind, and that’s to account for the fact that the data
  that we receive from services is, it’s just inconsistent.
            And, you know, another point that the panel
  brought up earlier is that money is the incentive for the
  industry to come together and build the right kind of
  resources to allow data and money to move freely.  We see
  that in-house at SoundExchange.  Ten years ago, we
  distributed $20 million in royalties.  Last year, we
  distributed $773 million.
            And it’s -- you know, it’s a 35 times increase. 
  And as that money has become more important to artists and
  to the record industry generally, that’s been the
  motivation to -- for us to develop these databases.  And
  we’re still in that process of developing the databases
  and in being able to ingest the data into our systems. 
  And, in fact, Maurice mentioned the problems of ingestion,
  and we see that as well with the services that send us
  data, with the services that provide us royalties.
            These services are large and small,
  sophisticated and unsophisticated.  And some services are
  entirely capable to receive data that we might -- metadata
  that we can return to them, whether it be ISRCs or any
  other metadata.  Some services are not set up in a way
  that they can meaningfully leverage the data that we could
  provide to them.  So, that’s another challenge that we
  face.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.
            Maurice?
            MR. RUSSELL:  You know, everyone wants us to
  give them our data.  That’s the solution for everything. 
  One important thing to understand about our database is
  similar to what you described, is that it’s dynamic.  So,
  it’s not really a static database of ownership at a point
  in time; it’s a system.  It’s like a circulatory system or
  an exchange where shares of publishing catalogs can change
  hands at any minute so I can license from you today but
  have to pay you tomorrow and him next week.
            So, you know, one of the things that you have to
  keep in mind is also the cost of that.  We’ve developed
  our database over 90 years and paid for it by royalties
  and commissions from publishers and songwriters.  So, I
  hate to bring it back to money, but that is an issue.
            The other issue I raised a little earlier is the
  incentive of others to continue to participate by
  providing clean data to make sure that publishers are able
  to -- well, actually improves for publishers their
  licensing and payment experience.  And I think that it’s a
  decision that, you know, ultimately that will be made by
  our publishers and our board, and I think that those are
  things that they would take into account, that they would,
  you know, really want to see an improvement in how things
  work, not just the status quo.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.  And -- yeah.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  I mean, both Maurice and Brad
  have pointed out that both of them have built their
  databases for their own purposes, and giving certain items
  of data to the GMRO raises the question of whether and how
  the GMRO is going to reconcile those data elements, which
  may well be different because they’ve been created for
  different purposes.  So, there are a number of other
  questions around just simply the mechanics of making it
  happen.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.
            And, Lee, I have a question for you, lest you
  think you were getting off the hook here.  Because the
  Copyright Office report was very balanced, and while it
  required this data and identifier reporting from future
  MROs and SoundExchange, it also then said that once the
  ISRC codes and ISWC codes had been reported and were in
  this database, the users would be responsible for
  reporting those.
            So, I’m wondering, just like I asked them how
  they would feel about providing the data, how would your
  users feel about reporting the codes to identify what they
  performed or what they sold once it was already in this
  database?
            MR. KNIFE:  Well, I think there’s -- maybe
  you’re driving at what I’m hearing is kind of a second
  question behind that.  In terms of actually simply
  reporting what, you know, either sound recordings or the
  underlying musical works that those services used, simply
  reporting that they used them, I don’t think there’s an
  issue there at all.
            When we were working on the SIRA legislation,
  this particular point came up.  And, so, that’s kind of
  like the second layer of this that I was referring to,
  which is simply saying, you know, we used these whatever,
  35 million songs, is really easy.  And, indeed, you could
  -- you know, that’s public information that I don’t think
  any of my members are sensitive about.  But saying, and we
  think out of those 35 million songs 5 million are owned
  or, you know, controlled by this entity and 6 million are
  owned or controlled by that entity, that’s where it
  becomes sensitive.  And it becomes sensitive on both
  sides, right?
            The aggregators of that information and the
  owners of the songs and the owners of the sound recordings
  are sensitive about having other people know how much
  their works are being used, possibly figuring out how much
  compensation they’re generating.  And my services would be
  nervous about being able -- you know, being required to
  say we used X amount of, say, Warner/Chappell --
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Right.  No, I was actually
  thinking, for example, when your members report to Sound-
  Exchange what they performed, instead of giving them -- or
  in addition to giving them the title of the recording,
  they give them the ISRC code when it’s -- if it’s already
  in -- once it’s been provided to the GMRO database, so
  that you’re actually -- and same with the ISWC codes.  So,
  once it is in the database, that they report it, because I
  gather how many people and what percentage have -- of your
  reports actually include the ISRC.
            MR. PRENDERGAST:  Oh, it’s single-digit
  percentage.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Right, so it would increase how
  many report, you know, instead of just the title, the ISRC
  code.
            MR. KNIFE:  Again, I think if everybody had
  clean data about ISRC codes and it was reliable and it was
  permeated throughout the system, I don’t see a resistance
  to using an accurate ISRC code.  I think if there is a
  difficulty in raising the percentage of ISRC codes that
  are being employed, it has way more to do with whether or
  not they’re reliable, whether or not they’re available
  than it does with anybody not wanting to use them when
  they know they’re reliable and available.
            MR. PRENDERGAST:  Yeah, I think that’s a really
  good point about the awareness of the ISRC.  It’s a
  relatively new standard identifier in the grand scheme of
  things.  It’s generally been applied to tracks that are
  more recent than to older tracks.  And Jacqueline also
  mentioned the problem of artists who own their own masters
  not necessarily having or being aware that they have
  access to getting their own ISRCs, whether it’s through CD
  Baby or some third party.
            And anything that we can do, anything that the
  government can do to incentivize the use of ISRCs will --
  it will have an upward spiral effect that will increase
  the ubiquity of the ISRCs, will increase the use of the
  ISCRs, and as Lee mentioned, will increase the trust in
  the ISRCs.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Thank you.  Since we are
  running out of time, I can still ask more questions, but
  if people want to -- because I’ll keep asking questions
  until I see you guys in line there.  So, if you have
  questions to ask, please stand up and get in line.  And if
  not, I’m just going to continue to ask some questions.
            My next question actually I think you’ve all
  mentioned in your comments before I even asked it, which
  is is there a need to make the identifier systems for
  songs and recordings interoperable or linked in the music
  field.  And I think in your introduction every one of you
  independently, on your own, said that.
            MR. KNIFE:  Since I have the microphone, I was
  going to say, as I was listening to everybody’s responses,
  I think that’s absolutely paramount, right?  I mean, on
  some level, people like Rick, they make some money on
  folio and selling sheet music and stuff, but the
  preponderance of the, you know, of the money that’s
  generated here is a song associated with a particular
  sound recording.
            I think that absolutely has to be the focus. 
  That’s the way -- you know, that is the point of the
  realm; that is the commerce that is current.  And, you
  know, Rick needs to know what recordings embody the songs
  that he writes, and everybody on this panel needs to know.
            MR. CARNES:  Yes, but it’s important for
  everybody here to understand that Rick may not ever find
  out, even if the publishing information and the recording
  are linked together, I may never find out, okay?  Somehow,
  the creator needs to be in there, too.  We need to have
  access to that data.  If you look at the way data is
  loaded in the system and searched right now, what we’re
  doing is we’re looking backwards, okay?  We’re looking at
  works, recordings, et cetera, and then trying to trace
  them back to the creators.
            What we really ought to do is start with the
  creators, have a database from the creators, and then what
  works that creator has created.  That’s the problem.  The
  problem is we have the recordings over here; we have the
  publishing information in the Copyright Office, you know,
  call the publishers the copyright owners, but we like to
  think of them as the copyright leasers, okay?
            We’re actually the copyright owners, so I think
  a better system and something we should think about like
  redefault or at least taking the glue that links the
  publishing information and the recording information and
  make that be the creator.  Put that in the database and
  make that the standard identifier, and then you can always
  find from the creator the works, okay?
            And when we talk about the thing about what are
  the splits in the songs, that’s where we get into
  complexity being fraud, because the reason why the splits
  aren’t the splits ever, is because the record labels and
  the producers, they all get together and they decide,
  okay, well, on this cut, we’re cutting our artist in and
  he’s getting 50 percent, okay?  So, we could stop a lot of
  that if we had an actual database of creators and the
  splits were the splits at the time the thing was
  registered and we use that as the standard identifier.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Is that Monica, I think?
            MS. CORTON:  Yes.  I’m Monica Corton, I’m a
  music publisher.  And we keep talking about this ISWC
  number, but to be honest, we don’t use that in any facet
  of music publishing licensing at all.  And I don’t even
  have them.  I’m just barely catching up getting all our
  ISRC numbers and things to YouTube, because we -- in the
  digital world, we have to have that information now.
            And, so, what I wanted to know is if this -- if
  this GMRO was created would part of the function of it be
  assigning these ISWC numbers, because in the last panel,
  the book -- the woman said that ISBN numbers can cost $250
  for two ISBN numbers.  So, if there’s going to be a cost
  to songwriters and music publishers, especially
  independent music publishers, they won’t be able to take
  that on to participate in the system.
            And the other question was what kind of
  compliance things would -- did the Copyright Office talk
  about, because in working groups that I have with music
  publishers, all the younger music publishing people are
  very much about sharing data, being part of the data, and
  all the older ones are staunchly against sharing anything. 
  And there’s no -- there’s kind of no -- it’s a really hard
  bridge to build.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Well, for your first question,
  I’ll ask Mark to answer because I think ISWC codes are
  assigned; you just might not know them.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  I mean, I think your point about
  the ISWC goes to my earlier point about too much of this
  stuff is done in silos.  And basically the ISWC has been
  run by the collecting societies who really had no serious
  conversation with the music publishing industry about
  involvement in how it works and actually involvement in
  its dissemination.
            That is just literally in the last sort of six
  to nine months beginning to change, but it should have
  been like that back in 1995, not in 2015.  And, so, that
  really is a major issue.  And, I mean, in the case of
  ISWC, the funding model is basically the societies pay a
  chunk depending, I think, on their revenue.  Maurice
  probably -- and so there isn’t a direct cost to the person
  who wants to allocate an ISWC.
            MS. CHARLESWORTH:  Yeah, I was just going to add
  that, I mean, a lot of what I’m hearing here is sort of
  the point that the Copyright Office is trying to make,
  which is you have a lot of good intentions and a lot of
  interest but a lack of coordination.  And this is an area
  where -- we didn’t recommend that the government set up
  and run the database, but it’s really, I think, unless
  there are actual -- and you asked about incentives, you
  know, basically financial incentives or, you know, it’s
  tied somehow to the payment system at least for this stuff
  that’s under -- still under government regulation, we’re
  not going to necessarily see a lot of improvement in this
  area.
            I think one point you raise is sort of the
  accessibility of the numbers.  That needs to improve.  You
  know, I mean, they are handled very well, I think, and,
  you know, CISAC I mentioned who, you know, oversees them,
  but clearly if we’re going to move to the system, it has
  to be a very transparent and easy system for individuals,
  you know, like Rick to get his ISNI or whatever.
            By the way, Rick, I mean, we are recommending a
  creator standard.  In other words, in theory, you know, if
  you had those three, you would be listed in the database
  as Rick Carnes, and you could see and link to your ISRCs. 
  But I agree that that -- you know, they have to be
  accessible.  People have to know -- affordable.  People
  need to know how to get them.
            You know, we recommended -- you know, it’s a
  complex recommendation.  I can’t get into all the detail,
  but basically there would be -- you know, if the data was
  missing, the licensee would pay into the GMRO and there
  would be a delay in terms of getting payment out.  So,
  that’s already an incentive for publishers and creator
  songwriters to get their data in.
            In addition, you know, we would have -- the GMRO
  would set benchmarks, say, you know, you need, say, 80
  percent of your ISRCs in three years, whatever it would
  be.  And then, you know, or ISWCs, and if the MRO fell a
  little short of that mark, then they could maybe have to
  pay to defray some of the licensee’s costs in using the
  system.
            The only other thing -- and I would also say
  SoundExchange is a nonprofit entity, but it’s a
  government-regulated entity.  So, you know, I think -- and
  they’ve done a great job in building a database.  So, in
  terms of, you know, I think we had that model somewhat in
  mind when we were thinking about the GMRO and how it might
  operate.  So, it would be a nonprofit but with some level
  of government supervision.
            And in terms of, you know, the work that’s done
  by SoundExchange or this -- you know, the GMRO and how
  that interrelated, that’s something that we think the
  government should look at.  I mean, I think this issue of
  the database, you know, again, just having hung out in the
  industry and heard these discussions for 15 years -- I’m
  getting old -- I don’t think it’s going to be solved
  unless there’s a little -- Lee said sharp stick. 
  Something, there needs to be more prodding to get it done,
  and it’s going to require some work and it’s going to be
  frustrating, but I think it’s sort of like taking the
  medicine and hoping that, you know, in the end we’ll all
  feel better.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  This industry’s great at
  developing standards but absolutely terrible at
  implementing them, and I think that’s where government
  with its sharp stick could actually be very useful, is
  making sure the people implement the blooming things
  properly, otherwise, we’re all wasting our time.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  And I have one question for
  you.  I know this is the last question, because we’re
  running a little over.  Just so we can learn, why did the
  previous attempt at creating a global database of -- and
  it was just musical works; it wasn’t even musical works
  and recordings.  Why was that unsuccessful?  And I’m
  talking about the GRD, so that, you know, we can avoid the
  traps.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  I’ve spent most of the last year
  in a lot of counseling trying to figure out the answer to
  that question.
            (Laughter).
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  There are lots of practical
  reasons and there are lots of business reasons, some of
  which, you know, I can’t really make public, but the
  conclusion of my brooding is that the GRD -- the team
  around the GRD failed to properly communicate to its
  community, by which I mean it was seen particularly here
  as very much a European project, and it wasn’t.  It had
  the EC with the sharp stick, but it wasn’t a European
  project.
            So, we needed to be here, you know, once every
  two months seeing organizations like the Songwriters
  Guild, seeing the publishers, seeing the other societies. 
  And we needed to do that in Asia and in South America and
  even in Africa, and we didn’t.  And, so, when the time
  came for people to get their checkbooks out, spelled with
  a Q-U, by the way --
            (Laughter).
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  -- that people, particularly in
  the US which was obviously going to be a lion’s share, was
  simply not well enough informed about what it was we were
  doing to be able to make an informed decision.  And I
  think that’s how it fell apart.  If we had been
  communicating, as I said, absolutely regularly and
  rigorously, we would have brought everybody along the
  journey.  And, so, when the time came for the hard
  decision to be made, it would have been a lot easier.  And
  I think we would be in a different place.
            MR. CARNES:  I think -- through my involvement
  in, what I saw, it was like a political process, and it’s
  who gets what when, where, and how.  And at the end of the
  day, there were some discussions about who was going to
  run this, who was going to do that, where the thing was
  going to be located.
            I mean, all of these decisions create money for
  someone somewhere down the line, and so then when you
  start parsing out, okay, I’m paying for this but I’m
  getting that, once you start doing that on a global basis,
  you’re going to run into so many problems, I don’t think
  it can be done.  I mean, not by private entities.
            I think that’s going to have to be, you know,
  the EU and everybody else getting together and -- because
  I don’t like turning stuff over to the government, but I
  don’t see how you can do it without the sharp stick
  prodding somebody because it does eventually become a
  political process where you are just adding up, okay,
  we’re not going to pony up this much money unless we have
  a return.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  Yeah, there was an element of
  that, as well, but I think, you know, a lot of that could
  have been smoothed over with better communication.
            MR. CARNES:  I kind of think they knew.  I think
  it was communicated a little too well.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Okay, well, thank you very --
  Hollis, anybody on line?
            MS. ROBINSON:  No.
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Nope, okay.  Well, thank you
  very much.  And thank you all so much.  And, Jacqueline,
  thank you.
            (Applause).
                         OTHER SECTORS
            MR. CARSON:  Okay, let’s get started because I
  know you don’t want to be late for lunch.
            Okay, we’re starting a little bit late, but
  we’ve got permission to go over if necessary, but you’ll
  be out for lunch no later than 1:00.  And if that is what
  happens, we’ll move the afternoon schedule back a little
  bit, too.
            So, let’s get started.  This is a panel that in
  some ways is feeding off the last panel, but as you’ll
  hear, in many respects, we’re talking about very different
  things, because the music industry is very unique in many
  respects.  And I’m not sure that the kind of scheme that
  we heard the Copyright Office proposing for music, an area
  where there’s been a lot of government regulation and
  licensing historically will necessarily work here.  So,
  we’ll see what people have to say about it.
            But the formal title of this panel is The Path
  Forward:  Interoperability of Standard Identifiers and
  Incorporation into Databases of Rights Information.  I’m
  David Carson.  I’m head of Copyright Policy here, and I
  think I was chosen to moderate this panel because I know
  absolutely nothing about any of this.  So, if they can
  make me understand what they’re saying, you’ll all
  understand it.
            In our conversation with the panel before we --
  or during the break, I heard a couple of ways of sort of
  breaking down what this is really all about from someone
  who represents right holders.  The question really is how
  do you get from the identifier to the money.  From someone
  who actually tries to get rights, I think the question is
  a little bit different, it’s we just want to get access to
  the data so we know who to go to to get permission.
            And that’s ultimately what we’re talking about
  here.  We’ve heard a lot about identifiers, and in the
  last panel we’ve heard about solutions for how you use
  those identifiers to actually get permission and get the
  money to the people who have the money coming to them. 
  And that’s really what we’re talking about here.
            So, I’m going to briefly introduce each of the
  members of the panel, and then a first round of questions
  to give each of them an opportunity to say a little bit
  about what their interest or the interest of the
  organization they’re working with is in this area.  And
  we’ll take it from there.
            So, to my left is Greg Cram, who is the
  Associate Director of the New York Public Library.  And as
  he’ll explain to you, his job is basically to try to
  figure out who owns rights to what they have in their
  collection so they can do the things they want to do with
  them.
            Next to Greg is Lawrence Lannom, who is the
  Director of Information Services and Vice President of the
  Corporation for National Research Initiatives.  And among
  many other things that CNRI does is they are responsible
  for the Handle system, which we’ll be hearing about.
            Next is Gene Mopsik, who until very recently was
  Executive Director of the American Society of Media
  Photographers and is now an advocacy strategist and a
  member of the Board of Directors of the PLUS Coalition. 
  And I’m sure Gene will be telling us quite a bit about
  what the PLUS Coalition is doing, which is trying to help
  people figure out who owns rights to what in the area of
  photographs, which is one of the big problem areas
  historically in terms of figuring out who owns what for
  reasons that are probably obvious, and if they’re not
  obvious, Gene will explain it to you.
            Next to Gene is Susan Cleary, who is Vice
  President and General Counsel of the Independent Film and
  Television Alliance, so they represent independent motion
  picture producers and distributors with an obvious
  interest in licensing.
            And, finally, at the very end, we have someone
  you’ve already seen, but he’s going to be on this panel in
  a slightly different capacity, Raymond Drewry, who in
  addition to being at MovieLabs is also a member of the
  Board of the Linked Content Coalition.  And among other
  things, we’d like Raymond to tell us a bit about what the
  Linked Content Coalition is and what it does.
            And, in fact, let’s start with that, Raymond. 
  Why don’t you give us sort of an introduction to the
  Linked Content Coalition and what solutions it offers to
  facilitate the licensing of digital content.
            MR. DREWRY:  Okay.  The Linked Content Coalition
  is formed of standards bodies and people who implement
  standards.  I think that’s something that’s come across
  pretty clearly today is that you can have a standard, but
  if nobody uses it, it doesn’t really matter.  And the idea
  is to make those standards work better with each other. 
  I’m avoiding the word “interoperable” because I honestly
  don’t know what it means in a generic sense, except that
  you can get from things that speak one standard to
  another.
            So, it talks a lot about mapping of identifiers
  and transforming metadata between systems and messages
  that are compatible across the systems, relationship
  between items and how you talk about that.  We
  occasionally fill in little bits of standards where things
  are missing, but if you look, as you can -- as you will
  have guessed from the talks today, there are a lot of
  things where there are standards in existence.  There’s
  ISNI and ISRC and ISWC and EIDR and ISAN and DOI.  They
  just don’t work together.  And the Linked Content
  Coalition wants to make them work together.
            So, that’s basically -- it’s done some
  recommendations on identifiers, which you heard about in
  Mark’s talk this morning.  And there are two
  implementations based on the Linked Content Coalition
  going on now.  One of them is the UK Copyright Hub, which
  you’ll hear about this afternoon; and the other is a
  European project called RDI, the Rights Data Interchange,
  which is a similar thing, funded by the European
  Commission.
            And as a tangible example of the
  interoperability there, they’re doing something about can
  you license particular Danish films.  So, they get the
  rights information from the Danish Producers Association;
  they get some descriptive metadata from the Danish Film
  Institute; they get some IDs from EIDR and ISAN.  And then
  they say here are these four things that really are
  different; can you then have a user say I want to -- all
  of the Danish films I know have fled from my head --
  there’s actually one called A 
  Royal Affair that we’ll use.  I want to license The Royal
  Affair in Poland for, you know, small-scale viewing.
            And then you go in with the title; you get an
  identifier back.  That identifier might be an EIDR ID. 
  The Danish producers say, oops, I only know about ISANs;
  then it says, ooh, but I can map an EIDR ID to an ISAN ID
  using the metadata or the calls.  And then you’ll go
  through to the Danish producers; you get the license; and
  it goes all the way back.  And all of this happens with no
  new standards having been invented -- none, which is good. 
  Just some people had to write some software.
            And the user doesn’t know about all this
  machinery that’s going on behind.  So, that’s the idea, is
  to simplify the connection of all of these already-
  existing systems.
            MR. CARSON:  Great.
            And, Lawrence, let’s hear a little bit now about
  what the Handle system is and how it works.
            MR. LANNOM:  So, I’m actually representing two
  things here.  One is the Handle system, and the other is
  DOI.  So, I’ll start with the Handle system.  The Handle
  system is an identifier resolution system.  So, there’s a
  difference between an identifier, which is a string; an
  identifier resolution system, which is turning the string
  into some current useful information about the identified
  entity; and then a wrapped up system, which DOI, digital
  object identifier, would claim to be and is where you have
  that resolution system -- a syntax system for the string,
  a resolution system for turning the string into some
  useful information, and some data models, metadata,
  schemas, kernel data, things along those -- those are the
  words that float around in my head when I think about
  that.
            So, the resolution system part, going back to
  the Handle system, is used.  It underlies DOI; it’s used
  by the PLUS Coalition; and it’s used widely by a variety
  of libraries, but also outside of content, Internet of
  things, scientific data sets, and so on.
            There is a world of identification beyond
  content, so we’re sort of -- in addition to thinking of
  these sectors working with each other, there’s, beyond
  that, other worlds.  Scientific data sets, for example,
  are absolutely mammoth.  And they encounter a lot of
  problems, which are related to things that have been
  talked about today, but somewhat different, and it will be
  interesting to contrast and compare those.
            So, Handle system, a piece of low-lying
  infrastructure.  I’m not sure that it will relate more
  than that to this conversation.
            DOI is a digital object identifier.  It could be
  used to identify objects that weren’t digital.  And the
  point is it’s a group of domains or industries, including
  EIDR, that come together to get strength in numbers, as
  you will, and to have a common approach to these sorts of
  systems.
            MR. CARSON:  Okay, let’s turn to some of the
  people who actually have the content that they want to
  license.  Let’s start with Susan.  Susan, tell us a little
  bit about the industries you work with and what role
  standard identifiers play with respect to licensing in
  that industry.
            MS. CLEARY:  Sure.  Good afternoon, everybody. 
  April Fools, good morning.  Independent Film and
  Television Alliance is an alliance of 150 motion picture
  distribution and production companies, and the majority of
  our membership is based here in the United States, and we
  use identifiers obviously in a couple of ways.  We, at
  IFTA, have a secondary royalty collections database.  We
  handle tens of thousands of titles that we manage for
  secondary revenue.  And we do use ISAN in connection with
  revenue.
            So, I was the person that said, show me the
  money; don’t make me pay money to get no money.  And,
  certainly, what independent producers who produce about 75
  percent -- 75 to 80 percent of the theatrical films here
  in the United States are interested in is how is an
  identifier or metadata going to help me with delivery to
  online platforms like Netflix or GooglePlay or Amazon
  Prime or even services that our companies run themselves
  for their own product, like Starz Play.  Starz Media has
  their own VOD push-out service.  And what type -- we think
  of identifiers as just a subset of metadata, which is
  another subset of the delivery materials you give to these
  online platforms to exploit your work.
            So, cost is an issue for independent producers,
  and we tend to -- we tend to, in primary licensing, in our
  exclusive licensing, we tend to license -- license picture
  by picture.  We don’t license a huge catalog and so
  there’s not that volume discount we were all talking about
  this morning, that larger rights holders say, well, I have
  distribution for my entire catalog since 1945, and so I’m
  going to get EIDRs and ISANs for every single one of them.
            Usually, people don’t put the identifiers in
  unless, A, they’re mandatory, and we wouldn’t want them to
  be; and, B, that they know that once they pay for one of
  the identifiers and it’s associated with the film that it
  will have some sort of capacity to not just identify the
  picture but in some way be interoperable to bring revenue
  back to the producer, who has already made their up-front
  financial investment in production.
            So, we are really looking for the value
  proposition to be pitched.  We certainly do use
  identifiers.  They are mandatory in secondary collections
  in two countries for audiovisual, and that’s France and
  Spain.  And you must give them an ISAN number, if you want
  your royalty collections from that county.  We don’t agree
  with that.  But we do think that there is a place for
  identifiers in commercial production and high-value
  licensing, and we especially like it if it helps the
  consumer be able to search with the rest of the other
  metadata, find our product, and buy our product.
            MR. CARSON:  And, Susan, can you just clarify
  the distinction between -- I think you said primary and
  secondary licensing for those who aren’t in the business? 
  What two kinds of activities are more than --
            MS. CLEARY:  Primary licensing is your exclusive
  licensing.  It is face-to-face negotiations.  It’s what
  happens at film festivals and film markets.  We own and
  operate the American Film Market.  It’s the largest film
  market in North America.  And we have buyers and sellers
  from all over the world come, screen the movies, and
  negotiate for the primary rights, primary rights being
  theatrical, video-on-demand, which is Internet streaming,
  Internet download, good old cable TV, good old satellite
  TV, free television, over-the-air broadcasts.  Those are
  all your primary rights.
            Your secondary rights are revenue that come
  after the fact and, in some cases, such as France, very
  much after the fact, nearly a decade later.  It’s money
  you cannot count on to finance your production investment. 
  As independent producers, we finance up front.  We get --
  we secure distribution, collateralize those distribution -
  - those exclusive distribution contracts, and then we get
  loaned the production funding from banks for the
  production.
            So, the primary licensing is the licensing that
  fuels the production investment and gets us our production
  loan.  Secondary revenues might keep the lights on later
  on and let you be able to pay your bills or pay your rent
  because that’s a steady stream of income, but again,
  that’s after the fact and that’s not within our investment
  model at all.
            MR. CARSON:  Thanks.
            Gene, tell us how things work in the
  photographic world, where I suspect things work very
  differently.  And be sure to tell us about the PLUS
  project as well.
            MR. MOPSIK:  Okay.  Thank you, David.  Well,
  things are, I guess, fairly terrifying in the still space. 
  And let me start off by saying what will become very
  evident shortly.  Number one, I’m not a lawyer; number
  two, I’m not an information management specialist.  But I
  am a staunch advocate for photographers’ rights, and for
  me, the end game to this entire discussion about
  identifiers and database ultimately is all about fair
  compensation for rights holders and fair compensation for
  photographers, because when you look at the landscape for
  photography today, it seems that, as I’ve said a number of
  times over the last few years, that everyone’s figured out
  how to make money off of photographs except for
  photographers.
            And you look at any number of businesses whose
  business model is predicated on the display and
  distribution of images, where none of the revenue stream
  generated finds its way back to the image creators or
  rights holders.  And that’s a big problem.
            In the image space, so, we’ve tried to create a
  way to find persistent, machine-actionable attributors for
  images.  And as you may or may not know, metadata is very
  easily stripped from image files, and not even just
  easily, it is the default action in many of the activities
  that occur related to social media.
            For many years in Adobe Photoshop, the save-for-
  web function by default stripped all metadata from the
  image, supposedly because it bulked up the image file size
  by a few kilobytes.  But Adobe, to their defense, when
  this was pointed out to them, was kind enough to change
  that default, I think after the fourth iteration of the
  creative suite.  So, now the default setting does maintain
  metadata in image uploads, but many upload activities just
  summarily strip metadata, creating orphans and making it
  difficult to connect with rights holders.
            So, a number of years ago, a consortium of both
  images users and image creators got together to form the
  PLUS Coalition, which is a nonprofit with broad
  representation on both the creator and industry side.  And
  it was created to simplify and facilitate the
  communication and management of rights information
  particularly in the still image space, but has
  applications to other media.
            And we’ve been working with the Copyright Hub. 
  We’ve been working with the Linked Content Coalition. 
  We’ve been working with the RDI project, all of these
  efforts to, again, reach the goal of linking rights
  holders with rights -- with those who want to acquire
  those rights and get fair compensation.  Now, PLUS is not
  a -- it’s not involved directly in the licensing of
  images.  It is kind of the backbone that would be used by
  something like the Copyright Hub to make the connection
  between rights holders and users.
            And we’re hoping that it gains traction, and
  we’re hoping that it continues to have use and viability. 
  We’ve been -- we’re in the stage right now of creating a
  registry.  It would be -- would federate with any of these
  other registries that we’ve talked about.
            I heard a comment earlier.  I thought it was
  interesting that one of the questions in today’s symposium
  is toward a US hub.  And when I first saw that the other
  day, I thought how strange that really was because,
  ultimately, it’s not about a US hub and it’s not about a
  UK hub and it’s not about an EU hub; it’s about one
  connected system, because for us, at least in the image
  space, it’s a worldwide market.  And images are very
  easily stolen and used.
            One other just quick point that, again, I think
  the solution that we’re looking for is not really in the
  high value licensing, because that seems to still work
  pretty well in the marketplace.  What’s eating up or
  what’s being denied to photographers now is all of the
  secondary licensing revenue.  There are all of these
  images that are being used, either innocently or by
  intent, again for which none of the revenue finds its way
  back to the rights holder.
            MR. CARSON:  So, just one more question, Gene. 
  You mentioned the PLUS Coalition actually doesn’t do the
  licensing itself.  You mentioned the Copyright Hub is
  something you have some hope for.  Is there anything else
  going on right now with respect to collective licensing in
  any respect for photographs?
            MR. MOPSIK:  Well, you know, again, I have to
  say that from the work that I’ve done in the last couple
  years, I find there’s a whole lot more happening in the EU
  and the UK than there seems to be happening here in the
  United States, and I’m gratified that we’ve been holding
  the series of hearings that Representative Goodlatte has
  had, and I’m grateful for the roundtables that the
  Copyright Office has held.
            And at the same time, I look at the movement
  that they’ve had in the UK in a very short period of time,
  and even if they have a misstep, I have to say I’m more
  grateful for what they’re doing because I believe they
  have the opportunity to actually set a standard and work
  out some of the problems that ultimately, you know, may be
  solved for us.  But they’re moving.
            Here in the US, we’ve talked about the creation
  of a RRO or rights management organization for
  photographs.  We don’t have the historic exemptions from
  collective action that the Harry Fox Agency has or that
  music has.  And, so, we don’t believe there’s an
  opportunity for compulsory licensing under the current
  legislative climate.  And, again, the image space, I
  think, has just been particularly hit hard.
            You know, everybody’s a photographer.  It’s very
  hard to communicate the value of something that just
  exists as ether and that most people think of as a
  recreational activity.  And, so, when a photographer
  stands up and says, you know, he needs to have an income
  stream or some kind of revenue stream for the use of his
  images, frequently those kinds of requests are met with
  extraordinary hostility.
            And I found it interesting that in the music
  space, we were saying earlier, you know, that you build
  these systems and you have these identifiers, and then
  once you can connect to the rights holder, people pay. 
  Well, in the image space, you know, we’ve become
  commodified.  You can -- you make those connections, and
  still, people don’t want to pay.  They just don’t want to
  pay for the use of images.  Very difficult situation.
            MR. CARSON:  Well, let’s get the user’s
  perspective now, and let’s ask Greg to tell us a little
  bit about what he does at the New York Public Library with
  respect to licensing and getting permissions and so on. 
  And let us know also the role of identifiers, how
  important they are to you in terms of going about those
  activities.
            MR. CRAM:  Sure.  So, I’ll tell you first a
  little bit about NYPL.  So, the New York Public Library is
  a world-class research center, one of the largest research
  libraries in the country, paired with a large network of
  branches, what you think of as regular, local,
  neighborhood branches.  So, we kind of have a unique
  perspective coming from both sides there.
            So, my job is to review the copyright status of
  archival and historical works in our collections, a
  collection of about 55-and-a-half million items, and try
  to determine the copyright status of those items when we
  can, and those things are in copyright or we’re not so
  sure, then we have to think about how we want to use those
  things.  So, do we want to rely on exceptions and
  limitations like fair use, or do we want to pursue
  licenses.  And those two things aren’t necessarily
  exclusive -- mutually exclusive.  So, there are certain
  times where we license works.
            So, we have lots of intellectual property issues
  at New York Public Library.  We have lots of items in our
  collections.  We’re licensing lots of material.  If you
  can imagine what’s held at a research library, we have all
  sorts of content.  We have unpublished manuscripts; we
  have published photos; we have published films.  We have
  just a whole variety of things.  So, we’re not focused and
  locked into one particular unique identifier.  For us,
  we’re looking at the entire market, how can we interact
  with the entire market and not just pick one field out.
            So, as a network, our network libraries, our
  network neighborhood libraries, we tend to license ebooks
  for the most part, and we spend a significant amount of
  money and an increasing amount of money on licensing
  ebooks, from partners like 3M and OverDrive.  So, we’re
  spending more and more money on licensing ebooks.
            We’re also spending money on licensing
  electronic resources for academic purposes.  So, academic
  libraries and research libraries overall spend on average
  or just as a whole, we spend $1.6 billion per year on
  licensing content from third parties for research
  purposes, for academic journals, JSTOR, things like that. 
  So, we’re spending significant amounts of money in this
  field in licensing.  So, we’re very focused on how we can
  help this -- help drive some efficiencies in the market.
            So, in our experience, you know, the unique
  identifiers are kind of odd for us.  We deal with
  historical works where there are no unique identifiers. 
  So, when we’re trying to go license a photograph with a
  photographer, we’re trying to reference, you know, the
  negative number or, you know, how we can describe the
  asset in our metadata system.
            In the cases that we can digitize the photo and
  send it to them and say this is the photo that we’re
  talking about, even those cases we’re finding that the
  photographers may not necessarily be able to claim the
  rights in it, may not be able to warrant and rep-and-
  warrant for us that they are the rights holder.  So, we’re
  having a problem of being able to locate rights holders --
  identifying works and locating rights holders at the same
  time.
            MR. CARSON:  That raises a question I’ve had, as
  well.  When you’re dealing with older works, I would
  imagine that finding standard identifiers or assigning
  standard identifiers is a much bigger issue than going
  forward.  Going forward, we can all at least with good
  faith say, all right, there’s a way to do this.  But 
  are there efforts being made -- this is for anyone who
  would know -- are there efforts being made to sort of
  retrofit our databases so that we have identifiers for old
  stuff?
            MR. CRAM:  So, at New York Public, we actually
  assign a unique identifier for every single asset that we
  digitize.  And that unique identifier is located on our
  site.  So, we’re trying to make that information more
  open.  We’re also exploring a link to open data and how to
  make our metadata tied to unique identifiers more
  available for people to access.  But that’s a local
  effort.  Some of you may want to talk about it.
            MR. LANNOM:  So, it depends -- okay, it depends
  on the domain.  So, journal publishing is fairly
  straightforward, managed by librarians and publishers for
  a long time in a standard way.  So, essentially, every
  journal article ever written, back to Royal Society,
  1600s, has a DOI.  But that was relatively
  straightforward.  And it’s -- you know, it’s pretty much
  the same thing that’s been going forward the whole time.
            MR. DREWRY:  So, for film, where the major
  national film archives really are going back and getting
  IDs for everything they have, and they have, as film goes,
  very old stuff.  The Library of Congress has Edison
  originals.  The British Film Institute has a bunch of
  interesting stuff from the late 1890s.  And even the
  Hollywood studios have vast archives.  Paramount’s archive
  goes back to 1928.
            But, once again, in film, it’s relatively
  straightforward.  First of all, there’s only, you know,
  150 years or so of stuff to do, and then you sort of know
  film has been a relatively static thing in terms of how
  you describe it.  You know, the director was called
  something different and all, but you can just do it.
            It turns out that old television is harder.  Old
  television, the data for it is really, really terrible and
  really, really sketchy.  And there are large runs of TV
  shows from the early 1950s that you sort of have to guess.
            MS. CLEARY:  Actually, you could -- you bring up
  a good point about episodes and episodic television.  ISAN
  and V-ISAN, which is their -- you know, they’re a different
  version.  You can put episodes in of television series,
  and that actually does in the secondary or compulsory
  mandated licensing is very useful because, you know, How I
  Met Your Mother Episode 1 or Episode 72, some of them even
  have -- some of the episodes even have -- long-running
  shows have the same title because the producer forgot that
  in -- you know, in the first season, they named the
  episode the same thing or, oops, the writer is a new
  writer and he wrote the exact type of conundrum to be
  played out, and, you know, type of story line.
            So, episodic TV is a really good one.  But,
  again, if the producer doesn’t see any value in the
  distribution, if it’s not currently being distributed or
  being exploited out there, they’re really not interested
  in a consumer getting in touch with them and saying, hey,
  I want your film.
            If they’re not served on one of the online
  platforms around the world, you can’t get them on
  LoveFilm, then they don’t really care about the consumer
  calling, unless they’re making a movie and want to pay
  them, you know, money to incorporate a clip from their old
  movie into their new movie, and it’s a commercial
  transaction, and even that would be -- you know, obviously
  you’d find the person, but it would be subject to face-to-
  face negotiations.  It wouldn’t be compulsory or
  collectively managed.
            MR. CARSON:  Is there anything we can learn or
  take away from what we heard in the last panel on the
  music industry?  I know, for example, in the music
  industry, it’s very different in many respects.  The
  notion of interoperability between the ISWC and the ISRC
  is sort of a no-brainer.  If you understand how things
  work there or if you were listening to the last panel, but
  any analogous situations we have with other media?
            MR. MOPSIK:  I would just quickly say that if --
  if I’m not mistaken, one of the schemas we were talking
  about in music involves a direct support from the
  Copyright Office.  And in the image space, if, in fact,
  there were to be in some of the things we’ve talked about
  for a long time, have been a small claims option.  And if
  there were to be a database maintained, let’s -- you know,
  under the current means for registering images under group
  registration, the truth of the matter while the
  registration is easy and affords photographers to register
  large numbers of images at one time, it ultimately, as,
  David, I’m sure you know --
            MR. CARSON:  We’ve had many conversations on
  this.
            MR. MOPSIK:  -- leads to a meaningless
  registration because you have a certificate for, you know,
  something that reads “My images from April 1 to April 30,
  2015" and they’re not searchable, they’re not keyworded,
  there’s no, you know, metadata search.  You can only
  search by author or by title, which is fairly meaningless
  for a photograph.
            So, if there were to be a more meaningful, I
  guess, registration process that was then coupled with a
  database for locating rights holders or if there were a
  link to a database, that would be, I think, a step
  forward.
            MR. CARSON:  Ray?
            MR. DREWRY:  We could be a lot better at
  connecting musical works to the films and television shows
  they’re used in in terms of trying to get cue sheets maybe
  a little bit more standard, have them -- yeah, I get that
  a lot.
            MS. CLEARY:  I was going to say that as a
  comment, but then I said I’m going to laugh at myself.
            MR. DREWRY:  No.  So, I happen to know that in
  the UK one of the music rights societies just for dealing
  with royalties for broadcast of television shows gets six
  different cue sheet formats, and there are only four
  broadcasters, right?  So, we could do better there.  But
  it requires getting the film industry and the music
  industry to actually have a productive conversation
  together, and at a technical level, that’s relatively
  straightforward.  At a governance level and that kind of
  thing, it turns out to be substantially harder.
            And all of this, I hope you’ll all come away
  with it, technology is hardly ever the problem here.  It’s
  about governance; it’s about social habits; it’s about
  economics.  You know, software is software.  We sort of
  know what we’re doing.
            MR. CARSON:  Well, let’s jump into the last
  question I wanted to ask.  We may come back to some
  others, too, if we have a little bit of time, depending on
  questions.  And if you do have questions, it’s probably
  time to start queuing up.
            But that is what is the role -- what role can
  government play in helping to make this meaningful?  I
  mean, it’s well and good to have identifiers, standard
  identifiers that identify works, but in and of themselves,
  they’re pretty meaningless unless they are connected to
  something that actually gets you the information you need
  and leads you to the person or the licensor that you need
  to get to.
            In our Federal Register notice, we had some
  suggestions, but they’re just suggestions.  We’re not
  pushing any particular agenda, any agenda at all.  We’re
  trying to figure out whether there’s a role for the
  government.  So, I mean, obviously the Copyright Office
  has initiatives.  Obviously, there’s things the Copyright
  Office might do with respect to registration and what they
  might require on registration.
            Are there other things we can and should do to
  promote the greater use of standard identifiers in various
  sectors or in all sectors?  And interoperability, whatever
  that means, and I know in our pre-panel discussion we
  weren’t quite sure what it meant.  It means different
  things to different people.
            Is there any role we can play in encouraging the
  creation of standardized frameworks for APIs that you
  would use to communicate?  Should we be working with other
  countries to prioritize the use of identifiers or
  standards or participate in the development of
  international licensing projects, facilitating the
  creation of participation in the Copyright Hub, as we’ll
  be hearing about this afternoon.
            What, if anything, can government do?  You may
  tell us go away and leave us alone; or you may say we
  really need your help.  But we’re here ready to help if we
  can, but we’re trying to figure out what role, if any
  government can play.
            MS. CLEARY:  I’ll start.  I would never say
  government go away, we don’t need your help.  We always
  need the government’s support and wisdom and being a
  facilitator for conversations like these are very
  important.  But I think what we found out today through
  going through all the different formats and all the
  different industries is that one size does not fit all. 
  And all of our industries are different, our financing,
  investment, and distribution and production models are all
  different.  The metadata that we would have is all
  different.
            And we really, really cannot interfere with the
  development of the marketplace.  The marketplace is
  developing.  There are proprietary systems that can
  monetize.  There are -- all of the acronyms we’ve all said
  today, and in all different industries.  And I just -- I
  don’t see -- we have a hub, it’s called the Copyright
  Office, I think, and it’s a very good hub for searching
  and for trying to figure out what is registered here in
  the United States of America.  But for an international,
  online environment and a digital eco-chain from production
  through distribution and that long tail we all talk about
  -- maybe Eugene’s people don’t have a long tail -- they
  probably don’t even have a tail.
            MR. MOPSIK:  (Off mic comment).
            MS. CLEARY:  Yes, that mean coyote.  But we
  really need to, I think -- industry needs to sort this
  thing out.  Online platforms are going to be a huge player
  in this.  Remember that when we talk about producers most
  producers do not own their own distribution channels and
  networks.  And the major studios might own some, but they
  don’t own all, and they have online platform distributor
  competitors, and we really need to have the government
  facilitate but perhaps step back and allow the marketplace
  to develop the way it will develop.
            And the delivery of our physical materials, even
  if they’re digital, to every single one of our
  distributors is going to be played out in the business
  environment.  The area where we’re going to have consumers
  look to identify us, for some of the industries, that’s
  just not a commercial model, and there would be no
  exchange there.
            So, until the identifier can link and operate
  and deliver, perhaps, even, with one or two clicks, the
  actual materials that you’re going to -- you know, that
  the consumer wants or wants to view, wants to use with 
  a negotiation in place, and I don’t see that ever
  happening, we really need to step back and see what 
  the marketplace is going to do for each one of our
  industries.
            MR. CARSON:  Anyone else on the panel have any
  thoughts?  And in expressing your thoughts, if there are
  any sharp sticks you think the government has.  We heard
  about that in the last panel, and one can imagine where
  there might be sharp sticks with respect to music, where
  there is some government regulation going on.  Other
  sectors, not necessarily the case, but we’re interested in
  hearing.
            MR. LANNOM:  I’ll try and be brief.  One, don’t
  even think about doing this other than in an international
  way.  You know, national stuff is gone, and it all has to
  be international.  Two, one thing the government can do is
  they -- the government has a lot of content.  The
  government has a lot of things that could be identified. 
  So, the government itself should manage its own data in
  the way it would like to see the world managed its data
  and content.  And that’s -- across agencies I know that’s
  hard.  I’m involved in some efforts now that are doing
  that with NIST and other areas.
            The government can produce mandates.  Whether
  this is a good idea or not depends, but in the world 
  of scientific data and scholarly publishing, the
  government -- the US Government just did that, and it’s
  increasingly done around the world.  So, if the government
  funds a project, the results of that project must be
  publicly available.  That’s driving a lot of stuff, a lot
  of change.
            MR. MOPSIK:  I agree with the world solution
  issue.  I think that the Copyright Office, given
  sufficient or significant or more significant funding
  would be great to see APIs so that it could communicate
  with other registries, communicate with the PLUS registry,
  communicate with the Hub.  And then if the image
  registration process were modified so that it would then
  be searchable on a per-image basis by means other than
  title or rights holder, I think that would be great.
            MR. CRAM:  Yeah, and from our perspective,
  there’s lots of data that’s siloed, and we’ve talked this
  morning already about lots of data and how it’s being
  siloed.  That’s not really useful for users to access.  If
  you’re keeping the data behind walled gardens, there’s no
  way for us to get to that data and help pay you or request
  permission from you or contact you.  There’s just no way
  to do it.
            So, if you start to make that data available
  through linked open data formats or other ways of making
  that data open, and I’m not saying you have to make, you
  know, the address of the rights holder heir available. 
  We’re not asking for that, but we are -- would like 
  some more interoperability between that data, so making 
  it available in an API so that it can be constantly
  updated.  We heard already about how in the publishing
  world those -- that data can change regularly, the
  copyright owners can change often and regularly.
            So, outputting that data via an API is going to
  help address some of those problems.  So, to the extent
  that the government can help facilitate and support that,
  that would be great, having open data standards and
  encouraging the use of APIs to get that data out.
            MR. CARSON:  Okay, our last question will be
  from Ben Sheffner, MPAA.
            MR. SHEFFNER:  Thanks, David.  I’m Ben Sheffner
  with the Motion Picture Association of America.  I want to
  thank the PTO for hosting this very informative event. 
  I’ve certainly learned a lot this morning.
            But I basically wanted to be up here to sort of
  answer David’s last question, which is about what should
  be the role of the government in fostering both online
  licensing platforms in general and then the specific topic
  of today’s session, which is creating or administering
  standard registries.
            Speaking only on behalf of our own studios, who
  are, of course, major motion picture studios and
  distributors, our answer is essentially that we do not
  believe that the government needs to get involved in
  creating, you know, systems for standard identifiers.  I
  spent a bunch of time over the last several weeks speaking
  with people at our studios who are actually involved in
  the sort of cataloging and then licensing out of our
  movies and learning a lot about EIDR, which Ray Drewry
  talked about this morning.
            And what I learned is it’s working pretty well,
  and they’re happy with the system, which, of course, was
  completely private sector initiative, hasn’t been fully
  adopted yet, but it seems to be headed in that direction. 
  And, again, the private sector is working.
            I want to make clear we’re not commenting on
  whether it might be helpful in other copyright industries,
  whether it’s music or photographs or literary works, and,
  in fact, it might even be helpful to us.  We, of course,
  license in a lot of third-party material that is sometimes
  hard to find.  So we don’t want to discourage the
  government from getting involved where those industries,
  in particular, think it would be helpful.  But, again, for
  the licensing of major motion pictures, we think that the
  private sector is handling it pretty well.
            MR. CARSON:  Thanks, Ben.  I think the last
  thing we can take away from this, we certainly learned in
  the last 45 minutes, is that in this area one size
  definitely does not fit all, and we’ll have a lot to
  ponder.  Are you going to tell people about what’s coming
  up?
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Yeah.  So, sorry, we went 15
  minutes later than planned for the morning session, so
  what we’ll do not to cut into your already short lunch
  break is we’ll start 15 minutes later this afternoon.  So,
  instead of starting at 1:30, we’ll start at 1:45.  So,
  we’ll see you back then.  Thank you.
            (Applause).
            (Luncheon recess).
  UK COPYRIGHT HUB:  ONE MODEL OF PUBLIC/PRIVATE COOPERATION
            MS. CHAITOVITZ:  Welcome back, everybody.  We’re
  going to start.  I’ll call the afternoon session to order. 
  Now, hi on the web.  I’ve heard that there was no audio on
  the web, unless you saw they did post on the screens how
  to get the audio.  So, I’m going to tell you now.  If
  you’re watching on the web, to dial (888) -- no, to dial
  (888)453-9955 or (210)795-9035, and the participant pass
  code is 3477197, but Hollis will need to post that again
  to keep it up there so people can get access to the audio.
            Thank you.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, I’d like to welcome
  everyone back from lunch as people still stream in, since
  we kept everyone on such a tight leash for getting their
  food.  I am delighted that we were able to bring here for
  our program here today Caroline Boyd and Dominic Young
  from the Copyright Hub in the UK.  And as Gene Mopsik
  pointed out, the UK has been very advanced in looking at
  these issues.  And, so, I’m glad that we’re having the
  opportunity to have this trans-Atlantic conversation at
  last.
            I’ve been following this since the initial
  reports by Richard Hooper and Ros Lynch, and it’s amazing
  that just in a couple of years this has evolved into such
  a major initiative, and I’m really looking forward to
  hearing the latest about where it stands.  So, let me turn
  it over to Dominic, I think, first, who is the CEO of the
  Copyright Hub.
            MR. YOUNG:  Thank you, Shira.  Thank you,
  everybody.  Thank you very much for inviting us and giving
  us this opportunity to speak to you.  I was sitting here
  this morning with my head slightly spinning, as it often
  does when you start to think about the detail of these
  issues, and trying to think about the best way of trying
  to speak to everything that’s come up.  And I’ve decided
  I’m not going to attempt that, although feel free to ask
  me questions later.
            And what I think I’ll just do is tell you the
  story of the Copyright Hub, how it came to be, and what
  we’re doing, show you a little bit of stuff.  I don’t
  think we’ll be able to show you a proper demo because my
  UK technology is not playing ball with getting on the
  Internet, but I’ll show you some stuff that we are doing
  and also talk about where we’re going next.  And, so, I’ll
  do a bit of background, then Caroline will talk about the
  actual technology we’re building and how it works and the
  use cases we’ve got, and we’ll finish off with a bit about
  where we’re headed.
            I’m just going to talk.  I haven’t got lots of
  slides.  So, the Copyright Hub story begins with a review
  of copyrights that happened in the UK.  It started in
  2010, finished halfway through 2011, so it was really
  quick, which the government asked Professor Ian Hargreaves
  to conduct, to look at copyrights in the digital age and
  to answer some questions that had been posed to the
  government about whether it was fit for purpose.  And
  there was a strong sense that certainly from some in the
  sort of the technological field and the digital field that
  there were things wrong with it that might be lessons to
  be learned from elsewhere in the world and that copyright
  could be improved.
            And Ian wrote his report very quickly, and since
  I’m not a technical person, I’m not a political person,
  I’m not a policy person, I’m going to sum up -- I’m going
  to massively oversimplify the summary and say there were
  two big recommendations that came out of it.  One was for
  a few more exceptions to copyright.  Part of the initial
  proposal had been maybe fair use as exists in the US would
  work well imported into the UK, and I think the confusion
  was kind of hard to do that, but then in his view, there
  were some areas where exceptions could be adjusted.  So,
  that happened, and they’ve been passed into law.
            And the second thing was he proposed a thing
  called the Digital Copyright Exchange.  And I think what
  he was responding to in part -- well, I know, because he
  told me afterwards -- were some proposals that he’d got
  from some people in the media industry that as people
  often say if they’re on the sort of rights holder side of
  copyright, there’s nothing wrong with the law, leave the
  law alone.  But a practical sort of add-on to that, which
  was that the mechanisms don’t work very well, maybe there
  could be some work done to fix the mechanisms.
            That was a proposal that came from, among
  others, News Corp and Pearson and the BBC in different
  flavors.  And my Copyright Hub story begins around then,
  too, because it was just when I was leaving News Corp and
  I gained a little bit of input into what they might put
  into their proposal.
            So, as Shira mentioned, the government then
  hired a chap called Richard Hooper to review this and do a
  feasibility study into it.  And what Richard did, working
  with a civil servant called Ros Lynch, who is now the
  Director of Copyright at the IPO, the British Intellectual
  Property Office, was quite radically adjust the plan or
  the suggestion that Ian had made, and I think in the minds
  of many people, quite radically improved it, as well,
  mainly because he took it firmly away from what had been
  the perception was a sort of it would be a good idea to
  create a big monolithic kind of trading platform within
  which everyone registers their rights and the kind of
  rules of the game are written by some central authority
  and that the government should set it up.  And as we just
  heard in the previous panel, not everyone is always
  delighted by the idea of the government kind of getting
  too involved in setting the rules of marketplaces.
            So, what Richard and Ros proposed was something
  firstly, importantly, led by the industry, supported by
  the government, but not sort of driven particularly by
  them.  Secondly, that focused a lot on education and
  information and bringing people together.  And, thirdly,
  especially recently, focused a lot on the actual
  technology that exists to drive this business of copyright
  online.
            So, in response to the first thing, the
  Copyright Hub team, before I was on board, this was when
  Ros was still running it, created a website, which is
  still there, which is largely about information about
  copyright for people who don’t know anything about
  copyright.  That was deliberate, because a lot of the
  problems that had been identified focused on this kind of
  -- what we’ve heard referred to as the long tail, this
  high volume of low-value transactions, things going on on
  the Internet the whole time, the people are just doing
  quite casually, with their own contents and other
  people’s, without any sense of the relationship that had
  to copyright law, nor any sense of the relationship
  copyright law has to them.
            Because, again, we’ve heard it mentioned,
  everyone’s a creator now.  Everyone’s publishing their
  work.  Most of it’s, you know, questionable value to
  anybody else, but nonetheless, the law does not take a
  subjective judgment and say, well, the nicest work gets
  more protection.  It’s kind of the same in that the market
  decides what they think is nicest.
            So, the website is created, and there it is, and
  it has proved useful in helping people understand a bit
  more about copyright and where to go, but the second
  piece, which is the forum, bringing people together, has
  highlighted another issue.  It’s incredibly valuable, as
  we have seen today, and as we see in lots of other areas. 
  When you bring everyone in the room together from music
  and audiovisual sector and publishing and newspapers and
  photography and sit them all down and start to talk to
  them, it’s kind of amazing because you hear the same
  issues coming up in a slightly different flavor from all
  over the marketplace.
            And when you put users into the mix, too, you
  hear problems coming out that, you know, seem a bit mad. 
  There’s a great example -- it’s a shame Richard Hooper
  couldn’t be here, because he tells these tales much better
  than I do -- about education where schools typically in
  the UK had to get -- was it 12 or something different
  licenses from different licensing bodies just to do their
  teaching work.  Even more inconveniently, they all renewed
  in September, which was just when they were busy admitting
  new students and doing other things.
            And thanks in part to putting everyone in a room
  together, that got reduced down.  Everyone started to
  coordinate on dates and make them a more convenient time,
  and then it actually led to the government buying a single
  license from all of those bodies to cover all of the
  government-run schools in the country, and so reducing
  hundreds of thousands of transactions down to just one. 
  Quite good.  Just put people in a room and point out
  obvious problems and sometimes good things happen.  That’s
  an ongoing process, too.
            But it highlighted, and this was around the time
  when I came on board, which was December 2013, that all the
  education in the world is a very useful thing, but if the
  mechanism by which you have to follow this path, here’s a
  piece of content I want, where do I get the licensing. 
  That’s a mechanism that’s fundamentally built on processes
  that firstly are different from one sector to another and,
  secondly, are built for this relatively high value,
  relatively low volume, relatively sort of business-to-
  business professional market that the creative industries
  have existed in for such a long time.
            You’re not making it very easy for people, and
  obviously if you want people to behave in a kind of
  compliant way, making things easy for them is one of the
  first prerequisites.  So, it led to the third sort of
  track of what we’re working on, which is technology.  And
  that’s the thing that I think -- the thing I want to talk
  about the most.
            When I came onboard, I had a job interview where
  I set out a couple of things that I thought were
  critically important for making things work.  One was the
  technology needed to perform the simple, basic functions
  needed in the market needs to be open source.  It needs to
  be something that is not proprietary and belongs to a
  single commercial entity.  And nor should anyone be sort
  of -- or no central single body be trying to sort of tax
  the market.  There’d been talk of funding it by taking a
  little piece of transactions, you know, and slicing off a
  penny here and a penny there, a bit like credit card
  companies do, but I think that’s a terrible way to go
  about things.
            And, thirdly, actually, there should be no cost
  of entry for anybody when it comes to, for instance,
  getting identifiers, which we’ve been talking about all
  day, other than those that the market chooses for itself,
  you know, that we shouldn’t be imposing them centrally. 
  But I thought that if we could be true to those ideals, we
  would be able to create something, which would deliver on
  or had the potential to deliver and which I thought was
  also really critical, which was something that can be
  adopted by anyone, regardless of what it is they want to
  use copyright for or where they want to use it, the system
  should not be a barrier to that.
            Copyright law, although obviously a lot of the
  focus of what we do and talk about is about commercial
  applications, copyright law does not say copyright is only
  allowed to be used for commercial applications.  It’s just
  that lots of people choose to use it that way.  But lots
  of other people don’t, or lots of people use it in a semi-
  commercial way, you know, Creative Commons is a good
  example of licensing, which is generally noncommercial,
  but it sets limits.  You know, most Creative Commons
  licensing say if you use something commercially, it’s not
  covered.
            It should be just as applicable to that and also
  it should be just as applicable anywhere -- anywhere in
  the world.  So, to that extent, although when I show you
  at the end our web address and our email addresses, all
  end with UK, it’s not a UK Copyright Hub.  It’s something
  that the UK has kicked off but wants to and is willing to
  give away to anybody who wants it, wherever they are.  And
  we can talk a bit more later about how that can be
  structured, the government models that can be adopted, how
  it can be applied in different countries or sectors.
            But, fundamentally, for me, if we set this thing
  up in a way that creates any sort of proprietary and
  closed control over the basic functionality, then it’s
  guaranteed to fail, and I don’t want to waste my time on
  it.  There will be lots of reasons for people not to
  adopt.  And, equally, if we try to set something up that
  demands that things that are already working have to
  change, that doesn’t work either.
            So, when it comes to identifiers, as we’ve been
  hearing, some content types have identifiers and they have
  very well run schemes for managing identifiers and others
  don’t.  Where you’ve really got an identifier in a well-
  managed scheme, the last thing we should be doing is
  saying, well, you’ve got to change that now because we’ve
  come up with a better idea.  Terrible idea.
            And, also, as we’ve been hearing and very
  influential -- the two very influential things on me were,
  firstly, actually, there’s lots and lots of work that has
  been done in this space.  And we have formed partnerships
  with people who have already done most of the hard work. 
  One of the reasons why we are able to make quite a lot of
  progress quite quickly is because we are not starting from
  scratch on anything.
            One of our first relationships, still an
  absolute critical one, was with the Linked Content
  Coalition.  They are solving lots of problems that we are
  now not having to solve.  We’re just integrating their
  work.  There’s a lot of people working on both projects. 
  We’ve got a great relationship with PLUS, with Jeff and
  Gene and others who have been incredibly generous with
  sharing the work they’ve done and, in turn, we are working
  with them.
            We have great relationships with a lot of
  collecting societies in the UK who provide us with funding
  and use cases and expertise.  And, also, we have use cases
  and funding and expertise and real participation from
  American organizations, too.  It’s profoundly non-British
  in that sense.  CCC, Michael Healy’s here, who’s a great
  fount of wisdom and knowledge for us.  The Motion Picture
  Association, who provide us with some funding, but also
  provide us with, as you all now know, having seen so much
  from this morning, the genius Raymond Drewry who is
  incredibly generous with his knowledge and expertise and a
  really great sort of critical sounding board for what
  we’re doing.
            And just by way of contrast, I think what I’ll
  do is I’ll talk a little bit about the technology, in the
  simplest way I can think of, which is to show you a video. 
  Now, bear in mind what I said at the start.  The Copyright
  Hub was set up to address an audience of people who
  largely don’t really know anything about copyright, nor
  about the Copyright Hub and when we tried to explain it to
  them scratched their heads a little bit.  So, we made a
  video to try to explain in very simple terms what we’re
  trying to do.  And I’m going to play it for you now, and
  after that, Caroline is going to talk a little bit more
  about the detail underpinning it.
            So, with fingers crossed -- oh, by the way,
  before I play the video, I should say to anyone watching
  online, I have my doubts about how well this is going to
  work down the wire, so if it doesn’t work very well, I’ll
  leave these up here just for a second.  Copy one of those
  web addresses; the video is also in both of those two
  locations.  So, if it’s not working down the line, feel
  free to play it for yourself.
            And here we go.
            (Video played.)
            MR. YOUNG:  Very simple.  The interesting thing
  about that is that the approach kind of make sense to
  people, when you talk about it that way.  Obviously,
  there’s a massive amount of complexity that gets hidden by
  such a simple approach, but it’s a quite useful thing to
  bear in mind, because there’s lots of things, especially
  the Internet, that’s fabulously good at hiding complexity. 
  It’s still there, the complexity.  It’s not been sort of
  beaten out and forced not to exist anymore, so to make
  things easy.  It’s just hidden.
            What happens when you type in a domain name is
  quite a complicated thing.  You press “enter” on your
  computer.  The latest made-up statistic that I made up a
  nanosecond ago is this 1.376 billion machines on the
  Internet that might contain that website.  Your machine
  will find one of them immediately, and it will talk to it
  immediately, and it will have quite a complex
  conversation, mostly about where to put things on the
  screen, actually.
            But the only thing that’s different, in my view,
  between that conversation that goes on and the one that we
  would like to go on, which is about rights, is the subject
  of the conversation.  The fundamental technology is not
  something that has to be particularly different, which is
  one of the reasons why we like to say that one of the
  goals for this is to try to make copyright work the way
  the Internet works, or at least give it the tools to be
  able to behave a bit more that way.
            A critical relationship that is mentioned in the
  video is with an organization called the Digital Catapult.
  The Digital Catapult does have some UK Government funding
  and also some funding from other sources, as well.  And
  this is an organization that has been set up to accelerate
  innovation in areas of the British economy where without
  help it would be slower to evolve.  So, this is absolutely
  in the center of their mission.
            And what they are doing for us is putting quite
  a considerable amount of resource in the form of technical
  resource developers and a technical team and also a really
  nice office to work in to help us develop all the tools
  that we need to deliver the technology.
            So, the Copyright Hub is a story of fantastic
  partnerships, bringing together all sorts of work, most of
  which has already been done, some of which we are doing
  with the Catapult to try to create something we can give
  away.  And doing that, spending quite a lot of money on
  it, and then giving it away is quite a difficult thing.
            I’ve been involved in lots of cross-industry
  initiatives in this general area, and up until the day I
  found myself accepting the Copyright Hub job, much to my
  surprise, the best advice I could give anyone about those
  projects is don’t do them.  This is a partnership that
  makes it possible for us to do that.  It’s also an
  organization that is overseen by creators and users and
  the creative industry.
            So, even if all the funding is coming from the
  creative industries, because they’ve got the money, our
  board consists of individual creators, representatives of
  creative industries, companies, and people representing
  the interests of users, both sort of ordinary people,
  ordinary individuals, and in this case education
  establishments who are the receiving end of lots of
  licenses.
            So, we really are trying to do something that is
  a public good and that we can -- that we can use to create
  a capability for everyone on the Internet to use and where
  the benefit accrues back to the market, back to the people
  who find the clever ways of being innovators and find
  clever ways of collaborating, of creating their own
  technology that builds on ours and doing the things that
  we’ve seen happening in the creative industries for 300-
  and-something years in the UK, which is massive growth
  driven by the connection between popularity and reward,
  which copyright is fundamental to creating.
            So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to hand
  over to Caroline.  She’s going to talk a bit more about
  actually how it works, the technology we’re building with
  the Catapult and the use cases we have.  We have over 70
  now.  Every use case is an example of an implementation
  someone wants to make of our technology.  And the
  technology is nearly ready for lots of them.  So, Caroline
  is going to talk about that, and I’ll come back afterwards
  and fill in a few more details.
            MS. BOYD:  Hello.  So, well, Dominic’s already
  said what I’m going to talk about:  how do we -- I’m not
  going to dwell too long on the technology and dive down
  into it, but I think it’s just worth speaking around how
  we do make that connection between the content and the
  rights holder or this system that can talk about rights or
  pass the request on to the right place.
            Let me just get my head around this technology. 
  So, at the heart of the hub, there is -- it’s very simple. 
  I have to say that the hub is incredibly simple in its
  architecture, and that’s not simple because we haven’t
  spent a long time thinking about it.  In my view, and I
  come from a small development house -- I’m very used to
  actually getting things done -- this has been a parallel
  task, along with getting things done, of getting people
  together who can advise and getting the thinking done
  behind it, too.
            Now, that’s a long journey.  It’s still going
  on, some of it, but enough thinking has been done to make
  this into what I consider to be a really simple, neat
  model.  At the heart of the Hub there’s just an index,
  which ties together the hub key, which I’ll talk a little
  bit about in time, and the identifiers that participating
  content providers might choose to give us.
            So, if I’m a movie coming from Netflix, maybe I
  would just tell the Hub about a Netflix ID, but if I’m
  EIDR, I might tell the Hub, too, about the EIDR, the
  Netflix ID, the Amazon ID, how they all tie up together,
  the IMDB.  And all of those identifiers are tied together
  by this one hub key, which is a URI, can be resolvable.
            Now, that really helps because if you’re in an
  area where you don’t necessarily have an identifier that’s
  associated with your piece of content, and we talked about
  this, we heard about this earlier on one of the panels. 
  There’s a wealth of content out there with no public IDs. 
  You could, when you’ve registered or onboarded -- sorry,
  terrible word, but we use it -- your content -- not your
  content, but if you told the Hub about what you’ve made,
  what your work is, you could use that, take that hub key,
  and you could embed it in your work, and that will go out
  onto the Internet and can be resolved back through the
  Hub.
            So, it can stand in place for an identifier. 
  It’s absolutely free.  It is simply a URI.  It is not the
  true kind of identifier with a registry backing it. 
  Dominic’s spoken a bit about that.  But it does help
  resolve, and we find that incredibly useful.  We’ve
  started working in the images field, and for the picture
  libraries that have come onboard, that’s been a really key
  part of how it’s working for them.
            How do we access the Hub?  There are really two
  points to access it.  You can ask it a question.  That’s
  the discovery service.  Or you can tell it about a work
  that you’ve created, and that’s the onboarding process. 
  So, it’s data in, data out, to be honest.  It’s as simple
  as that.  And that’s achieved through APIs, so it’s a very
  behind-the-scenes technology, this.
            And, of course, as Dominic also said, it’s
  really important that this is a distributed system.  So,
  we have the source repositories, as many as content
  providers want to join in.  We don’t ask people to put
  their data into the Hub at all.  What we do is provide
  them with -- you can see that for each database there,
  there’s an adapter at the top.  We provide them with a
  service that can take their identifiers and any rights
  information that the content providers would choose to
  share with the rest of the Internet or anyone who’s
  accessing the Hub and keep that in a common format so that
  those repositories could be queried together if necessary.
            The index, of course, is reducing the amount of
  querying you’re doing across the distributed systems,
  because when an identifier comes in, it might say, okay,
  it’s maybe within two or three of those databases you’ll
  get a simple response back again.  It might be only one
  and you get the response back.
            How are we showing the world how this actually
  works, given that it’s successful only by APIs is not the
  most engaging demonstration when you start saying here’s
  an API, shovel some XML at it or some JSON at it, what
  happens.  What we’re doing is we’re working with the use
  cases who’ve already informed how we’re developing this
  and implementing or working with them.  In fact, in many
  cases, they are just generously implementing their own
  applications and integrating the Hub into those.
            So, outside all these services, you can see Hub
  applications coming onboard.  And they might be using the
  discovery service and asking -- just asking questions. 
  They might be content providers, registries offering data.
            So, let’s have a look at how many we’ve got.  As
  Dominic said, we’ve got over 70.  That’s the current
  status of where they are.  We’re at a very exciting point
  at the moment.  We’re just ready to go live with some of
  them.  We’re going to show you a live demo, and I’m going
  to show you some of the live systems that are just coming
  out in the next two or three weeks, actually.  So, it’s
  very close now, and we’re absolutely at that point.
            I guess one question I do sometimes ask is why
  do we have quite so many, because people do contribute use
  cases.  As Dominic says, they’re very happy to talk to us
  about use cases.  And as we talk to them, I think the
  architecture, the way we have it or the way it’s described
  and because it’s a public good service, it’s entirely free
  to use, people that just start, if you get it, very often
  we’re not offering business cases for them, but they’re
  seeing new ways of doing business and new ways of
  extending the business they currently do.
            So, the first use case I’m just going to talk
  about briefly now that we’re quite excited about is an
  existing supplier, it’s Capture, who works with a lot of
  picture libraries -- some of us in the audience know them
  already -- and with galleries and museums.  Now, they
  already have a digital asset management system, Capture
  Content Services, though, which isn’t their name for it,
  but it’s how it appears for us.
            They also have a service, Capture Desk, where
  you can find images.  It’s like a light box, and then you
  can find the licensing that you can acquire for those
  images and pay for them.
            So, the way they’re going to implement the Hub
  is when content goes into their digital asset management
  system, they’ll onboard it to the Hub so the Hub will know
  about that.  That’s the tranche of content coming in. 
  But, also, if they find an image and put it into Capture
  Desk, ask the Hub where to go to have that conversation
  about rights, you might end up going back into Capture the
  usual way, because they know about the content already and
  you’ll achieve payment through them.
            But, excitingly, where content’s been registered
  to the Hub by other picture libraries or other systems,
  then the response will go back to their payment systems
  and then we can buy more licenses.  So, they can maybe buy
  licenses or find out how they’re allowed to use this
  content that they’ve discovered.  So, that expands the
  reach quite considerably.
            What does this look like in practice?  At the
  moment, it just looks like a lot of boxes and it’s mildly
  complicated.  I’m going to hand over to Dominic to do a
  short demo for you, which actually shows you how this
  works with two or three clicks just for the user, because
  on top of this, it’s actually quite simple to use.
            MR. YOUNG:  I’m going to show you a non-live
  demo.  We gave up trying to make that, but it does
  actually work.  So, what we’re going to see is screen
  shots, and if we can get within wi-fi distance or
  something that my computer will talk to, I’ll be able to
  show it to you for real, and that’s not a joke.
            So, this is with images because images are our
  first area that we’re really focusing on.  And this is an
  image that we found in Google of my esteemed chairman,
  Richard Hooper.  Now, if you found that picture, and
  obviously when you did find that picture you would
  instantly want to use it and post it everywhere you could
  think of because he’s such a wonderful and handsome chap.
            If you were going to try and track down the
  photographer of that image, you would find it quite
  difficult.  I find it easy because it was me when we were
  on the train to the IPO and we thought we’d impress them
  by doing this only moments earlier.  But there’s nothing
  at all that would lead you back to me from that photo.
            But we onboarded that photo through our trial,
  our test hub system.  So, this is real in Google when you
  can do it live.  And, so, the photo has an embedded
  identifier, and the browser has a plug-in, which is for
  the Copyright Hub.  Now, obviously, right now, that’s the
  only way we can do it, but there’s no reason at all why
  this shouldn’t become kind of native behavior in browsers. 
  It’s just another way of resolving an identifier.
            And when you right click on it and you look at
  that Copyright Hub menu, there’s an option that says
  “image license options.”  And when you click on that, it’s
  doing something that is really quite familiar to the way
  the Internet works, which is it’s finding the identifier,
  you can’t see it, but it’s there in the metadata; it’s
  resolving it.  Convenient enough, it’s a URI, so that’s
  the sort of thing a browser doesn’t have too much
  difficulty with.  It is contacting the server that sits at
  the other end of it, the repository that Caroline was
  talking about, and it’s asking it, you know, is it
  possible to get rights in this photo.
            Now, in this particular demo, the way we set it
  up is it responds with a popup, but it can respond with
  whatever Exampleco, which in this instance is the made-up,
  dummy company that is answering for those rights.  It can
  be whatever Exampleco I wanted it to be.  So, in this
  particular instance, it’s offering up some simple licenses
  for sort of low-level websites and social media.
            The reason one is grayed out is because in the
  other half of this demo, the photographers can choose
  which licenses they want.  Now, in reality, it would
  probably never be that complex as far as the photographers
  are concerned because Exampleco would be pretty good at
  working out what licenses to sell.  But the point it’s
  making is the control stays in the hands of the creator,
  which is where control should be.
            And in this particular instance, the other
  interesting thing about these particular licenses is we
  thought we’d try and make them realistic, so we got a
  bunch of small picture libraries in the UK into a room and
  said what would a realistic price be, what do you actually
  charge for this stuff right now.  And a lot of them were
  saying, oh, we charge 30 or 40 pounds and the license only
  lasts a year and, you know, we want to -- it’s traffic on
  the pages that we want to count.
            So, actually, we persuaded them that it would be
  quite a good idea, since nobody actually goes through
  their website removing everything that’s a year old every
  day, why bother asking them to do that, why bother trying
  to count what’s on the page, why not just count the
  traffic on the website.  Most people know roughly what
  their traffic is.  And why not offer it at a price that’s
  quite radically different, because this is the sort of
  behavior that’s happening all the time, thousands of times
  a day.
            Actually, one of the reasons it’s happening is
  because it’s impossible to get the rights.  And the second
  reason is because even if you manage to track down the
  rights owner, it’s quite expensive for someone who’s just
  mucking about and putting their website up.
            So, the interesting thing is a whole bunch of
  them just said, yeah, actually, we tried out those prices. 
  And a couple of them said, maybe we might even reduce them
  by 90 percent if the image is embedded, in other words, is
  served from their server instead of on the local stuff. 
  Interesting, the receptiveness of a market to try out
  radical new models once it’s easy to deliver.
            So, this is something that’s actually working,
  and I think it highlights one of the key points about what
  the Hub is trying to do, which is in my sort of simple
  view, after all my years trying to trade content in the
  newspaper industry, in particular, basically, the media is
  built on this process of seeking and giving commission
  with conditions attached.
            The condition might be, you know, because I
  employ you, I get all your work; or it might be I’m going
  to negotiate a fee with you; or it might be through a
  collecting society you’re entitled to certain amounts of
  money.  But this is giving receiving of commission on the
  one hand and value of some sort in the other hand that’s
  the lifeblood of it, because it’s quite expensive to get
  to this stage normally in lots and lots of areas.
            And it’s quite difficult to give licenses where
  the value exchange is not necessarily money.  But if you
  can get to this point for nothing, this is no more
  expensive than a DNS lookup once you’ve got your system
  set up.  Then you can imagine, hopefully, just what I’m
  talking about, so, the source of interesting innovative
  models that might emerge from the end of that.
            And if your license, now that it’s machine-
  readable, is one that can set conditions -- sort of future
  conditions, if your actual traffic goes above 50,000 then
  you might have to pay a bit more money, but you don’t have
  to use your crystal ball to guess whether that’s going to
  happen.  You can just make the license automatically
  respond to that.  You know, it sets up the conditions for
  all sorts of interesting innovation to happen and for the
  rules to be set by me or, in this case, because I can’t be
  bothered to do it myself, Exampleco, who are my friendly
  picture agency in this new world.
            There’s another little piece of this that’s
  worth mentioning.  If you do go through the buying
  process, you get another identifier, which is for the
  license.  And we’ve talked about this earlier.  If you can
  identify the right, the thing that says Caroline was given
  permission by me to use this photo for that purpose, that
  makes -- that starts to join up an awful lot of dots about
  how the kind of -- the permission world can actually work
  in practice on the Internet, not by reinventing everything
  that’s already there, but by starting in an area where
  actually it’s very difficult for anyone to do business,
  learning the lessons of that and then allowing the market
  to iterate the complexity.
            Caroline’s going to talk about another use case
  which is about to launch, which is equally interesting.
            MS. BOYD:  Which is that this is a really neat
  startup company in the northeast of England, and it’s a
  mobile app.  It’s just going to the app store in a couple
  of weeks’ time.  It’s centered around -- they’ve got a
  very nice niche, actually.  It’s centered around getting
  people to scan what they call their shoeboxes of
  photographs, their family photographs and their history
  photographs, get them online, share them, and build time
  lines together.  It’s actually very engaging.  I’m not a
  great app user myself, but this one I quite enjoy.
            But what they’re doing as part of that, and
  they’re great supporters of the Hub, is they’re making
  sure that all the photographs as they’re scanned in are
  registered with the Hub so that the Hub’s aware of them
  and in the future people can choose -- the people who’ve
  uploaded them will actually -- they’re kind of making a
  rights statement as they upload it and they’ll be able to
  say how they want that used in future when it’s found. 
  They might want to license it; they might want to sell it
  as part of a poster; but they might not want anyone else
  to use it.
            We’re also implementing -- as Dominic showed you
  -- the right-click browser add-on.  That’s fun; that’s
  great, too.  But this came up from one of our use cases
  from just a chance conversation.  They’d been working with
  one of the picture libraries who we’re working with who
  had some neat pictures of New York, and they wanted to put
  some in their website, and they were talking about that. 
  And we just suddenly said, what if we could use that
  website as a way to just sell those images for personal
  use.
            So, we’re introducing a left click, a little bit
  of HTML you’ll be able to paste into your page when you
  embed the image, show the Copyright Hub logo, and then get
  the same overlay that we got from the right-click browser
  just to show what licenses are available.  Or, you know,
  just connect you back with a person where the photograph
  came from.  And in that way, websites become really quite
  a powerful tool for disseminating images, and it makes it
  just easier for people to do the right thing, which is
  what we keep trying to do, and make it easy for people to
  do the right thing.
            The next one that we have, we’re moving into the
  world of audiovisual here, and a lot of life for this one,
  as well.  The British Film Institute looks after a lot of
  archive footage in the UK.  TVARK is what’s known as --
  it’s a fan site.  It’s run by some guys for free who are
  really passionate about TV from the ‘70s and the ‘80s.  I
  mean, hey, they do like it; it’s great; they’re fascinated
  by it.  And, actually, I have to say, some of it is very
  engaging.
            Theoretically, because they’ve acquired this
  content by ways you wouldn’t normally acquire it, I know
  certainly not written and asked for permission to use it,
  theoretically, they’re infringing.  But because they’re a
  hobby site, it’s not -- it wasn’t worth taking them down,
  and they curated brilliantly.  They’ve acknowledged that
  they look after it well.
            So, what the BFI is doing, we’re trying with a
  little bit of content first which is public information
  stuff.  I have to say, that’s quite fun, too.  So, here we
  have -- we in the UK will know this, you in the US won’t,
  but, you know, super heroes teaching kids how to cross the
  road does actually have use.  People will want to use that
  in their presentations or just for fun.
            So, they are allowing -- what the BFI will do is
  grant TVARK a license to show this properly on their site,
  legalize it, on the condition that they show a link -- why
  am I not seeing the link there?  Something’s gone wrong
  with my slide.  There should be a lovely little copyright
  link that comes up.  Our slides have gone wrong here --
  that would then link back to who they need to ask
  permission to use this for.  This is a trial.  The BFI
  looks after quite a lot of what one might term niche
  content, some of which relates to transport and other
  interesting areas, but if you’re using a fan site, it’s
  such a neat way to get it out to the people who really
  want to see that content and then use it onwards.
            What else are we doing?  This is where after the
  next few weeks we start getting a bit more serious.  We’ve
  got more picture libraries queuing up to come onboard. 
  We’ve got one -- well, one -- two actually now who have
  got their images in the Hub.  More picture libraries
  coming onboard.
            In the field of text, we’re looking at poetry. 
  These all represent particular challenges for us.  Poetry,
  if you want to use it, say at a birthday party or a
  celebration of some kind, very often you might just find a
  fragment, but the bit which we’re working on here is how
  that fragment -- those fragments would be connected out to
  proper identifiers and how we can go back to the
  publishers and the authors to get the rights on that.
            Classical music scores has kind of roared to the
  front, as well.  Again, this is another startup company,
  very dynamic.  And they are running currently a sort of
  project management group interaction site for classical
  ensembles.  And one of the things that came out when they
  came to talk to us is the need to have a central index to
  find out where to get your sheet music from.  And the
  classical music publishers have joined in with this very
  enthusiastically, I have to say.  They’ve already got a
  deal with one of the larger ones who are digitized, and
  one of the other ones, the Oxford University Press, very
  keen to come onboard, too.  So, that -- I think that’s
  quite nice because it’s extending it.  It’s not just
  digital content.  It is digital, but it’s also extending
  what the Hub can do into the world of print.
            Education, we’re talking about a use case here,
  and that will center around identifiers of different
  kinds.  So, if you’re at a school in the UK and you want
  to use some of the BBC content, that was free for you to
  use under the ERA license.  But if you’re in Belgium,
  France, the US, then there’s a small fee to pay.
            So, what we’re working on there is making -- I
  say we’re working on it -- I have to say our use case
  companies are working on it.  We do very little work. 
  We’re quite lazy at heart.  Working on making it seamless,
  so that if you want to use some BBC content, terrific,
  it’s straightforward if you’re in the UK.  If you’re not
  and you’re abroad -- not if you’re abroad -- if you’re a
  teacher teaching in another country, then you just get an
  immediate request for an ability to acquire a license.
            More in the audiovisual, we’re looking at
  putting together a library of film clips, again with some
  sort of niche cult interest.  And in music, music sync
  requests, and we’re working with a commercial company at
  the moment who is making headway here.
            Now, that takes us to the middle of this next
  year coming up.  What’s the rest of the next year look
  like?  This is a slide just plotting out how we’re working
  and where use cases come in the time line.  It represents
  about a year -- actually, 14 months of development.  We’re
  two months in, and you can see that at the beginning of
  the period, in the two months to four months of the use
  cases I’ve just been talking about, and then in the middle
  of the year are the ones like poetry and education.
            So, what are the more complex ones right at the
  end of the year when we really start getting some
  traction?  What we want to look at and where we will be by
  then is we’re looking at building the Hub into suppliers,
  more and more suppliers coming up and integrating the Hub
  so that it becomes seamless.  Integrating, also, with
  permission systems, the tech system, and to audiovisual
  ways of clearing content as well, so integrating with that
  to make that work with the Hub.  And we’re also very keen
  to integrate with platforms.  We’re working with a couple
  of social media companies.
            And the reason why integrating with platforms is
  an important step forward, Dominic mentioned that we would
  be setting up a hub key or an identifier for a granted
  license.  That means that at the point of upload to a
  platform you can actually test whether a license exists. 
  If you’ve got the content ID or you have the license ID,
  you can do that test.
            So, a very quick little run-through of how that
  might look.  I’ve got a photograph I got from somewhere
  and I want to upload it to my Twitter feed.  It’s the
  ideal point to say if you find there is no license for
  that use, just to say, hmm, please acquire one.  It’s only
  going to cost you a pound.  And once that’s been acquired,
  it’s uploaded, done, and all straightforward.
            Where will we be after that, two or three years’
  time?  Dominic will fill that in.
            MR. YOUNG:  I think -- to add to this one,
  actually, quite a few people I’ve spoken to have said
  they’re not that interested.  For things like that, you
  know, little, tiny uses, they’re not necessarily
  interested in trying to get money.  There’s no amount of
  money you could realistically get.  What they’re quite
  interested in doing is just knowing what’s going on with
  their content and that people have asked, so that if it
  does kind of go viral or in some other way, you know, turn
  into something huge, there’s some element of sort of
  knowledge or control.
            The Copyright Hub is not about DRM, not in the
  way people think about it, sort of technical protection
  measures, the enforcement of rights, but it is about
  making rights easier for everyone to manage.  And let’s
  not forget, that’s just as likely that the picture that
  went up onto Twitter was the one I took and someone else
  wanted to use.  I might just as well want to have some
  sense of what people are doing.  I might just want to keep
  stuff private.  There’s things I publish online.
            So, Shamwell (phonetic) is on my computer
  because at some point always the screensaver comes on and
  everyone sees pictures of my children, but those go on the
  Internet, but they’re not for anyone else’s consumption. 
  So, if they do leak out, so I kind of want my server to be
  able to say no, actually there’s no rights available.
            All of these things are possible, and we have no
  ideology about that.  We just think if you put the tools
  in the hands of creators and their organizations, they
  will use those tools to do the things that work for them.
            One of our first goals for this whole platform
  was to try to stimulate evolution, and I think we’re
  already seeing it.  The number of use cases we’ve got and
  the number of them that are new, I think is more than I
  hoped for.  We had four use cases last June.  We had about
  18 in October; we’ve got 70 now.  And we’re kind of lying
  about that because it’s a bit scary to admit how many we
  could count as being in our queue, and we only have so
  much resource.
            So, stimulating evolution is something that
  we’re already succeeding in doing.  And I think leading
  from that will be new models, new models of how value can
  be exchanged and what that value takes the form of, money
  and other things, too.  You know, data is something that
  is potentially valuable if you can use it in the right
  way.  And also new ways of people collaborating and
  forming relationships that otherwise would be difficult or
  expensive.
            In terms of how we’ve done, we’ve got a lot of
  support from the industry, the creative industries and
  beyond, really from all over the world.  And that’s stayed
  absolutely solid.  The creative industries have funded the
  Copyright Hub.  Some of the people who’ve contributed
  funding are here in the room now and give up a lot of
  their time to helping us and helping make us look good by
  giving all their great intelligence and knowledge.
            And as you can see, the technology is almost
  ready for real use.  We now have a big focus on governance
  and trust, because when you think about this issue,
  obviously for people to have trust in the market and trust
  in the data they’re seeing, that’s not something that you
  just sort of shrug your shoulders and ignore, because in a
  market where no one can trust anyone, you’ve kind of
  wasted your time.  So, there’s lots of folks on that now,
  and we can talk about it later.  That is a process that’s
  gone to a working group of the board, led by the amazing
  Mark Bide and his countless recommendations.
            And it’s also relevant in the context of the
  sort of theme of this session, which is could there,
  should there, would anyone want there to be a US copyright
  hub.  And the question about what badge you put on,
  whether you have lots of hubs or just one or what badge
  they wear is actually a governance question.  It’s
  something that we all need to kind of settle on ourselves. 
  I think the underlying technology on which all of those
  things would depend has to be free and open source, but
  the way you then deploy it commercially into a marketplace
  is something not for us, other than trying to put it in
  the right direction and make sure that there is trust in
  the market.
            So, the reason I keep looking at my phone is I
  put my notes on here and it keeps going on off rather
  stupidly.  I thought I was using my own computer.
            In terms of what we’re going to do next, I
  mentioned governance.  There’s lots of interest from lots
  of other countries, which is, again, very heartening
  because the idea of this being a UK thing is a waste of
  time.  Obviously, the fact that we’re here shows that
  there’s growing interest here, and thank you, Shira, for
  giving us this platform.  Also elsewhere in the world,
  too.
            And I think if this -- if people start to adopt
  our work and deploy it elsewhere, it will be a very good
  outcome.  One of the things the UK is very smug about is
  that they always punch above their weight when it comes to
  creativity, so we’ll be generous about giving away the
  technology.  We don’t think that’s where we’re going to
  create our advantage as a country and as an economy.  We
  think our creators will do that for us, and they always
  do.  So, we’ll be generous and we’ll share, because if we
  don’t, it will reduce the opportunity for UK creators.
            And we’re also very focused on our funding. 
  We’ve come a long way on hardly any money.  The total
  funding for the Copyright Hub for this year is under half
  a million pounds.  The Catapult delivers a similar amount
  of money in kind, but as you can tell, we’ve got an
  enormous amount of stuff going on.
            Up to this point, where we’ve been working on
  the underlying technology principally, more resource
  wouldn’t have helped, actually.  It wouldn’t make it
  quicker just to throw more people at it.  It’s really
  important to get it right.
            This year, I want to try and implement as many
  of those 70 as we possible can.  And when we get to
  January next year, which is when the full underlying
  platform will be finished and we’ll be able to release it
  open source, we’re going to have to put a load of effort
  into supporting that open source community and having a
  load of new use cases, and also there will be some real
  governance issues to deal with in real life.  There will
  be disputes.  There will be organizational issues.
            So, we have a big focus on trying to attract
  more funding from more places, bearing in mind it’s a
  public good, it’s an investment in the future of the
  industry.  It’s not an investment in a business.  We never
  want to be a business.  We want to be as small as we
  possibly can be.
            My original goal was for us to disappear
  completely.  I’m not sure that’s possible.  There will
  always be an index.  There will always be a need for a bit
  of governance.  But, really, I don’t think this helps if
  there’s a big player sitting in the middle controlling
  things.
            But first, right now, it’s a bit odd to stand up
  here and talk to you because every conversation I’ve ever
  had instantly becomes very interactive and there’s always
  lots of questions.  So, as well as noting the clock
  ticking, I should be -- we should be quiet and allow
  people to talk back to us, talk on the panel, ask us
  questions.  Everything’s a dialog.  And everything’s open,
  as well.  Anyone who wants to be nosy, get involved,
  should feel free to do so.
            These two links, I put them up only because they
  don’t spring out on the website.  They’re interesting for
  anyone to look at who’s got an interest in this.  The
  manifesto is just very briefly a kind of setting out of
  our stall.  The blueprint is the first part of a longer
  document that sets out the technical framework for our
  development.  Actually, the manifesto is at the start of
  it, so if you’re up for the big read, go for the second
  one.
            This will tell you a lot about what it is we’re
  trying to do.  And, obviously, be in touch, stay in touch. 
  If you think you can help, give us advice.  If you see
  where we might be going wrong, if you see, you know,
  pitfalls for us, then let us know, because there’s no
  point doing this unless it actually delivers outcomes for
  everybody else.
            Thank you very much.
            (Applause).
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, thank you very much,
  Dominic and Caroline.  And let me take you up on your
  offer to answer questions.  If you don’t mind sitting
  here, because I know from talking to the next panel that
  they may want to direct questions at you during the
  discussion, as well.
            And can I call up the next panel?
                   TOWARD A US COPYRIGHT HUB
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, let me start by introducing
  the panel.  We have first Jeff Sedlik.  Jeff is the
  cofounder and CEO of the PLUS Coalition that you’ve heard
  referred to already today, and he’s also a professional
  photographer and was the National President of the
  Advertising Photographers of America.
            Next to him we have Chris Reed, and Chris is now
  Senior Counsel for Fox Entertainment, so he’ll be
  providing the motion picture industry perspective, but I
  have to say that I first knew Chris when he was at the
  Copyright Office, so he also has a government perspective
  on these issues, as well, and worked as both a Special
  Advisor to the Register of Copyrights and also Acting
  Chief of the Information and Records Division.
            And we have Michael Healy next to him, who is
  Executive Director of International Relations at the
  Copyright Clearance Center.  He’s another UK participant
  in our program, and he has a background both in publishing
  and also in the library sector.
            Next to him is the person I’ve known longest on
  the panel, Jan Constantine, who is the General Counsel for
  the Authors Guild, but her prior experience also includes
  both a major publishing company and government experience. 
  So, we have a diverse panel.
            Next to her, Jim Griffin.  He’s Managing
  Director of OneHouse, which is an organization dedicated
  to the future of music and entertainment delivery.  And he
  also works as a consultant and when I first knew him was
  involved in the record industry.
            And then my newest acquaintance I have right
  here next to me, Jason Gordon, who’s an Associate in the
  Advertising, Marketing, and Privacy Law Group at Winston &
  Strawn.  And he has tremendous experience in clearing uses
  of all different types of content across all the sectors
  represented here on the panel, generally on behalf of
  advertising industry members and clients, I should say. 
  And, so, he’s actually going to be able to contribute
  particularly from the perspective of a user, how the
  copyright hub might or might not work.
            So, I wanted to just make clear that everyone on
  the panel should feel free in the middle of or before they
  make any comments to direct any questions to Dominic or
  Caroline, because I know some of what we’ve all heard is
  new.  And I’m sure everyone has a lot of questions.
            And I just would start with a couple of
  comments.  I mean, I think to a large extent what’s very
  exciting about the Copyright Hub project is two aspects of
  the project, and one is the fact that it does look -- it
  does approach things in a cross-sectoral way.  I mean, any
  particular use may be in one particular sector, but the
  Hub itself is looking at all types of copyrighted works,
  so it’s the opposite of a siloed type of approach and, you
  know, the word that we used to use, multimedia, comes to
  mind, although I don’t think anyone uses that word
  anymore.
            The second thing that’s particularly interesting
  and exciting is this idea that it is looking at what might
  be very large numbers of low-value uses and the fact that
  was referred to earlier on this morning’s panels as well
  that most large commercial uses are not going to be a
  problem because you’ll have sophisticated people
  negotiating with each other.  But there may be a
  tremendous amount of value out there that is currently -- 
            MR. GRIFFIN:  Do we have to stipulate to that?
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  No, you don’t have to stipulate
  to that.  But it’s certainly going to be easy --
            MR. GRIFFIN:  There are sophisticated people
  negotiating with one another.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  But it’s certainly going to be
  easier in the current system to get a license for large-
  scale commercial uses than for some of these smaller uses. 
  And there may be a lot of value, as Dominic said, that’s
  not being captured that a system like this might be able
  to capture.
            So, having said all that, just to start with a
  couple of, you know, very general questions to all of you,
  which we’ve talked about, the main issue that we’re here
  to discuss, would a similar initiative or project be
  desirable for US stakeholders.  And I don’t want to
  prejudge what I mean by a similar project, whether that
  means an extension or expansion of the Copyright Hub as it
  currently exists in the UK, even if it’s not the UK hub,
  or doing something similar but different here.
            And, so I open the question, do you see value,
  and then I guess the second question is would it be value
  in participating in what exists or trying to do something
  that might be similar, if not identical, here.  And, of
  course, you know, just one point to mention as a copyright
  lawyer that, of course, while all markets are global, and
  we heard a lot about that today, and, of course, that’s an
  important fact to bear in mind, copyright rights are still
  territorial, may be owned by different people in different
  jurisdictions, and the legal systems themselves are
  different.
            So, when you look, for example, at some of the
  boxes to check for personal use, the way personal use is
  treated in the US under the fair use doctrine might be
  different than the way it’s treated in other countries
  where there may be an exception and levies or an exception
  in some circumstances without levies, thinking of the UK
  system.  So, those, of course, are just complicating
  factors in talking about one global system, although I
  don’t think disqualifying factors, just things that would
  have to be dealt with in some way.
            So, I open the floor.  Do you want to start?
            MR. SEDLIK:  Sure.  We’re extraordinarily
  impressed with the work of the Copyright Hub.  Thank you
  very much.  As some of you know, many people in the room
  have participated or been involved in what the PLUS
  Coalition is doing, and, you know, the Copyright Office
  actually came to industry in 2004 and said this needs to
  be done, a way to discover information about visual
  assets, in particular, when we started working on this,
  but really what needs to be done is it needs to be done
  across all the different types of licensable media, and
  that’s what the Hub is doing, and that’s why the work that
  the Hub is doing is so important.
            But it’s really -- it really can’t be viewed as
  a national thing or anything that has any borders to it. 
  I’m really convinced that the solution to the problem is
  an interconnected network of hubs, so that you have hubs
  that can talk to hubs using an agreed-upon language,
  essentially, so that a search of any one spoke in any one
  hub in any country gets you to the information through the
  network, rather than having a single large database or
  even a single distributed database, in which you have are
  multiple hubs, so there’s several layers to this.
            And I really see that as what’s going to happen
  inevitably here, because it can’t be just private sector;
  it can’t be just public sector.  Different countries and
  different commercial enterprises and noncommercial
  initiatives are going to come up with solutions.  So, you
  know, the Copyright Hub in the UK is, you know, right out
  of the gate doing what needs to be done.  And we were
  hoping to see something like that.  In fact, we’ve been
  working with the Copyright Hub before there was even a
  copyright hub initiative.  We were working with the IPO in
  the UK on the idea, you know, bringing our experience in
  building PLUS to the IPO in the UK and saying, look, this
  needs to be expanded upon, and they were already ahead of
  us in doing that.  So, you know, hats off to Dominic and
  Caroline and to your entire team and to Catapult, as well.
            MR. REED:  Thanks.  So, from the audiovisual
  perspective and motion picture perspective, I guess I’ll
  channel my colleagues from this morning and just say that,
  you know, as our traditional business models relate to
  this, we really don’t see a need for such a hub in the
  United States, largely because most of our transactions
  are of the type, you know, they’re high-value, low-volume. 
  Our studio, I don’t have exact numbers, but we put out,
  you know, maybe a dozen to two dozen films a year.  And
  those get licensed through, you know, very sophisticated
  deals that we were talking about earlier.  And we really
  don’t see that a hub of this nature would add value to
  that.
            Where we do think it would add value potentially
  in our space is as we move into things like clip licensing
  and areas like that, there may be some value.  But we
  really think that, you know, if the government wants to
  focus on something like this, it really should start with
  some of the issues that we’ve heard about today, and that
  is particularly photography and music.
            And I will also channel Susan Cleary from this
  morning, who said that, you know, the United States
  already has a hub, it’s the Copyright Office.  And as a
  Copyright Office alum, I feel compelled to point out that
  the registration system, for all its failings, is, you
  know, still the national database of copyright ownership
  information.  And I think any solution we look at in this
  space needs to use that as sort of framework.
            And then, finally, just as an opening point,
  I’ll echo everyone else on the global point.  Our business
  is global, and I think pretty much everyone up here, our
  businesses are global.  And it would be, I think, foolish
  to look at this as a United States-based solution.  And I
  think the work they’ve done in the UK is probably a great
  place to start thinking about how to, you know, connect UK
  systems with US systems, so that they can all talk similar
  languages and things like that.
            I would just point out -- going back to my first
  point, I just wanted to note that, you know, you’ve also
  heard a lot today about EIDR, which is a standard that we
  built based on business need.  And, so, I think that’s a
  great example of how businesses can come together to
  create systems on their own that sort of address a lot of
  these problems.  And if there’s a role for the government,
  I think it’s probably with de-siloing, as we’ve heard
  about a lot today.
            MR. HEALY:  Yeah, to answer directly Shira’s
  question, is the Copyright Hub doing extraordinary,
  necessary work, the answer is yes.  When Richard Hooper
  and Ros Lynch were preparing their report for the UK
  Government, they visited a lot of organizations, including
  the Copyright Clearance Center in Danvers, Mass.  And they
  were kind enough to say in their final report to the
  government that many of the aspirations of the Copyright
  Hub had been realized in the tech sector by CCC, because I
  think they were pointing to two things at that point.
            One is we’d had a portal for transactional
  licensing in the tech sector for more than 20 years, and
  we’d been providing high-volume, low-value transactions on
  a permission-by-permission basis in the publishing sector
  for all that time.  And we’d also provided a point of
  content licensing solution, which many rights holders like
  The New York Times had embedded in their own websites.
            So, when they asked me to join the sort of
  stakeholder board, the partners board of the Copyright
  Hub, you know, they were probably just looking for a
  state-side Brit with a pulse who understood something
  about copyright, and they found me.  I was very glad to do
  it.  And I’ve had this sort of ringside seat watching the
  extraordinary work Caroline and Dominic have been doing
  under Richard’s leadership.
            And I was a little skeptical when Richard and
  Ros came to Danvers.  Here was this public servant plus
  this incredibly urbane Englishman of a certain generation. 
  And he had this very big vision.  And I was privately
  skeptical, but, you know, they’ve done extraordinary
  things in the last two years.  And whatever we do here in
  the US, whether it’s replicating what they’ve done or
  doing something different, I think we’d be crazy not to
  learn from their lessons and experiences.  And there’s a
  great deal we can learn, I think.
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  Hear, hear.  Dominic and I go
  back probably 30 years, so whatever he does is fine.  I’ve
  been at the Authors Guild for 10 years now, and during
  that time, I’ve dealt with the Google litigation, and an
  overlay of fair use has to be looked at if we’re talking
  global, because I don’t think any other jurisdiction has
  the fair use jurisprudence that we have here.
            And we tried to resolve some of these issues
  with the Google settlement, as Michael was very much
  involved in that.  It was a de facto collecting society. 
  It would have given you a lot of good supplier information
  had it happened.  We are still in the throes of
  litigation.  I don’t know how it’s going to end, and I’m
  not counting on getting Google to give us millions of
  dollars in order to create a registry.  But I have other
  ideas.
            So, the short answer is I think you’ve done a
  terrific job and I think it’s a good thing for everyone. 
  The problem with the authors is we don’t have anything
  that looks like registry or suppliers.  We have, at the
  Authors Guild, a sister company called the Authors
  Registry, and we get money from your organization, ALCS,
  and from LIRA in The Netherlands for secondary rights for
  public lending and for educational uses.  And we are a
  clearinghouse.  We give that money to, well, whoever we
  can find, and we find about 80 percent of the people who
  we’re looking for.  And most of these are out-of-print
  books, so we’ve been doing this since 1995 and we’ve given
  away $23 million so far.
            That being said, I think I’m going to channel
  Gene and Rick by saying the creators, all three of our
  industries have never been as poor as we are today.  And
  part of it is because we’re not being paid.  Part of it is
  because the royalty statements that we’re getting we can’t
  even understand, so we don’t know if we’re being paid
  fairly or not.  And, so, what we would like to do is set
  up a registry where we can give you the information so
  that you can share it so that we can get paid.
            Just to give you a one-minute announcement of
  something that we’ve been looking at, an initiative that
  we’re trying to launch, it’s called the Find Authors
  Registry, FAR.  And what we’re trying to do is set up a
  web-based database of the world’s published books, and
  we’re asking for rights holders, authors, publishers,
  heirs, whatever, to register.  We’re using the Library of
  Congress database.
            And we’re hoping people will stand up, wave
  their hands, give us the metadata that we need.  We’ll
  start with our members domestically; then we’ll go out to
  the members of collecting societies and other authors
  groups.  We feel it has to be international.  And what
  we’ll try to do is make it a place that people can go to
  to get information about who owns what.
            Once we set up something like that, and maybe
  we’ll use you to help us set up something like that, we
  can supply you with the information and then you can help
  us with the transactions, because every little bit counts. 
  All of these little transactions that you showed, I was
  very excited about one pound means a lot to a lot of our
  authors.  And the UK, you must have read the study that
  the ALCS and the Society of Authors did.  I think the
  median of an author’s income was 11,000 pounds, and that’s
  pretty sad.  You’ve got to get a day job for that.
            So, anyway, I commend you, I think it’s great,
  and I commend the Copyright Office for all their efforts
  on the behalf of copyright and the Patent Office, because,
  you know, you’re starting this dialog and I think it’s
  important.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  Look, there’s a lot to like about
  this, and when I met with Richard and Ros a couple of
  times about it, very helpful, too.  And Ros
  extraordinarily good from a technology standpoint, and
  Richard understands the industry and especially the notion
  that this could be global or that there could be a global
  component, it’s certainly encouraging.
            I think, though, that to fully understand the
  skepticism and the reason why there are many who feel that
  this may not go very far is that essentially, at least in
  America, people look at things as there’s the taxi
  commissioner and there’s Uber and you’re the taxi
  commissioner.  We’re meeting at the taxi commissioner’s
  office today, and we’re discussing how to defend the taxi
  industry from Uber.
            Because especially the first panel made it
  clear, there’s so many people now with so much stuff, I
  mean, I did a little study before I testified before the
  House Committee this summer, and it seemed to me that if
  you took the height of the sound recording industry in the
  year 1999 or 2000, that’s uploaded to YouTube before noon
  the first day of the year, and that SoundCloud gets that
  much stuff in the first four days of the year, and I think
  it can be said very positively that creativity is moving
  from the center of the network out towards its edge.
            And, so, I was discouraged by the first panel,
  hearing that we’re not really interested in the edge.  You
  know, this is built by and for intermediaries, and yet the
  issue is how do we connect endpoints, how do we get
  reporters to report with unique codes.
            Appalling statistic of the day, and no blame to
  them, SoundExchange says the percentage of money that
  arrives with a correct identifier is single digit -- a
  very polite way to say under 5 percent, because I happen
  to know the numbers.  And, so, what I’m saying to you is,
  is that, for example, if we don’t reach that first
  reporter, the one who reports the use of the material, we
  don’t get the correct identifier into the chain and Rick
  doesn’t get paid, because the odds of that correct
  identifier getting inserted after the first report are
  infinitesimally low.  And there are extraordinary motives
  for why that’s not going to happen along the way, which
  include keeping it out of his pocket.
            I think the one thing I would say that we need
  to make this work well, and this is with an ode towards
  part of the presentation, which was where it was compared
  to the DNS system, is that I’m all for a nonprofit
  wholesale core to this, that government may have a role
  in, especially to eat whatever antitrust sins pop up.  But
  I think there’s got to be a retail edge driven by profit
  motive.
            We were doing a presentation about these issues
  in Kristiansand, Norway, a couple of years ago, and a
  bunch of students were watching at a university.  And they
  stood up and said, we’ve never heard about any of this. 
  And it seemed to me that 90 percent of them knew how to
  register a domain name but that none of them knew how to
  register their own works.  This was a music school.
            And I think what we need more than anything else
  is advertising and outreach, in every country, in every
  language, which the DNS system has, because in India
  people speak over 100 languages.  How do you get outreach? 
  It’s with profit as a motive.  I’ve never seen government
  or nonprofits advertise well or engage in effective
  outreach, and yet when people have money at stake, I see
  extraordinary advertising, especially out of London in the
  UK.
            So, I would just conclude by saying that the one
  thing that could really spruce this up, especially from an
  American standpoint, is profit, is ensuring that we make a
  market in registry services that encourages people to go
  into business doing this and to advertise.  I mean, hell,
  GoDaddy advertises on the Super Bowl, and all they’re
  doing is seeking registrations for computers on the net,
  all of which are registered, more than 1.3 billion of them
  I heard today.
            So, profit.  Add profit; I think it works. 
  Leave profit out; I think you’re the taxi commissioner.
            MR. GORDON:  So, I represent a lot of
  advertisers and agencies, and I’m on the consumption side
  of the licensing.  I’m the one who’s negotiating the
  license agreements for, you know, either hundreds of
  thousands of dollars or $50.  And what -- from my clients’
  perspective, what I’m most interested in is not the --
  from a Copyright Hub perspective, I’m most interested in
  finding the right people to obtain the licenses from.
            Now, the status quo for content, for music, for
  television and movies, I know who to go to, I know who to
  speak to.  But what I don’t know is, you know, I know how
  to get a license for “Layla;” I know how to get a license
  for Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.”  I know how to find movies
  and television.
            What I don’t know is how to find the orphan
  licensors and those in the social media space who become
  instant sensations.  And that’s where I can see the place
  for the Copyright Hub, like that girl who created a video
  for her Match.com profile about loving cats and she burst
  into tears, and the next thing you know, she’s got an
  agent because clients of mine want to pay tens of
  thousands of dollars to rip off her video, or borrow it,
  for their own advertising purposes.
            And, so, ultimately, it’s those folks who I
  don’t know how to find that I can see a place for an
  equivalent of the Copyright Hub, but for the majors,
  whether it’s the major labels or the movie houses, the
  production houses, the television or movie studios, I know
  where to find those folks.  I know how to pay them, and I
  know who to contact to license.  So, I’d like to see the
  copyright hub for those unsophisticated and orphan
  licensors.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  And I’d like to give Dominic or
  Caroline a chance to comment.
            MR. YOUNG:  Thank you all for your comments. 
  And I think I’d just reiterate something I said, which was
  we’re starting in a space in the market where really it’s
  very hard for anyone to do anything.  And I think it will
  rise up.  We’ve spent the whole day hearing about the
  problems that kind of exist in the existing market now,
  and I think the Copyright Hub capabilities are capable of
  rising up that value chain, kind of as far as makes sense,
  and I think it makes a lot more sense in some sectors than
  others.  There’s lots of people in the audiovisual sector
  who sort of say they can’t see the relevance right now,
  can see how it might become relevant, and that’s kind of
  fine.  If it becomes relevant, the tool will be there and
  you can use it.
            I’d also say, by the way, that, you know, having
  spent 20 years working for Rupert Murdoch, profit is
  always very dear to my heart, but I think if we set this
  thing up as something which is only for people who want to
  pursue that particular goal, or we set it up as being the
  tax man or the regulator in the middle of the market to
  whom everyone else must pay their dues, then I think
  that’s the wrong way, but I think it’s absolutely
  essential that what we see is lots of Exampleco’s, you
  know, people who take hold of this, decide they’re going
  to get into the business of helping people make the most
  of their content in the sector they want to and make money
  from it and not have to come and ask me permission or pay
  me a share of their money.
            I think that’s what’s going to happen.  That’s
  how we’ll see some real innovation and some real
  entrepreneurial sort of activity happening in the market,
  which will start to drive it forward.  But that’s where
  the really interesting and exciting ideas will come from. 
  And if we’re in the middle, just as a dead weight on that,
  all we’ll do is hold it back.
            So, I find something to encourage me in
  everything that’s been said, actually, even if Chris and
  Fox don’t see it yet or only for a niche part of their
  business.  That’s kind of to be expected.  We are not
  trying to solve all of the problems up and down the
  entirety of this value chain.  And God knows, if we were
  trying to tackle even a fraction of the problems that
  we’ve heard about today, my head would have exploded a
  long time ago and I’d be locked up in a looney bin.
            I just want to sow the seed that solves the
  first little piece of that problem and starts the process
  of something that can grow into something much, much, much
  bigger if it wants to, if the market wants it to.
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  Can I just ask you a question? 
  How are you going to maintain your funding?  Do you have
  guaranteed funds for the next 10 years?  Is the government
  going to step forward?  Is the CCC going to support you in
  the style that you’re accustomed?  Do you have security
  for a five-year plan?
            MR. YOUNG:  This is -- we’re at an interesting
  moment in our funding because it’s only really now in the
  last few months that we’ve begun to have any sense of what
  our long-term funding requirements might be.  I’ve been
  very keen to be as sort of low-cost as possible, only
  because, you know, I don’t want it to become a silo and a
  great big thing and a cost sitting in the middle of the
  business.  Obviously, we need to have a sustainable model,
  and obviously we need to recover our costs.
            And I think probably rather than expose the
  entirety of that discussion, in the room, partly because
  we haven’t got time and partly because it’s ongoing, the
  best thing to say is that there’s quite a few models that
  are being considered, and I think a blend of them will
  prevail, that firstly we need to have a relatively low
  ongoing need; secondly, how we source money from lots of
  sources, public money could be appropriate.
            There was a bit of public money in the Hub at
  the beginning, and there is still some by the Catapult. 
  Various different ways that we can provide services to
  some of the players in the market on a -- on a commercial
  basis have been thought about.
            There’s a whole load of things, but right now,
  do we have our funding guaranteed for the next 10 years,
  no, we don’t.  Are we in discussions with lots of people
  about how to do that, particularly when the market depends
  on it not breaking, you know, that needs to be guaranteed,
  and that’s absolutely part of what we’re thinking of right
  now alongside governance.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  You know, I’ve got to express my
  skepticism there and my concern, and that is that, look,
  I’m for a registry that’s funded and controlled by
  creators -- by creators, for creators, and of creators,
  without anybody else having control.  And I’ll tell you,
  this is the new phonorecord industry in some ways.  This
  is the new Hollywood.  Registration is seen as just that. 
  The marginal cost of a registration hovers close to zero. 
  And the idea that you can have a great deal of volume in
  registration looks like a hit phonorecord to me.
            And certainly if you look at the DNS system and
  the amount of money that the GTLD movement has drawn, and
  for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, you know,
  the top-level domain movement has drawn -- just to apply
  you write a check for six figures, and they’ve no shortage
  of people to do it.  So, the notion that funding is an
  issue is funny, in  a way, because there is so very much
  money in a proper registration scheme.  And if it’s
  controlled by creators and they pay that fee and they’re
  the ones who dictate the information and so forth, I think
  you’re on a better footing than if you try to be all
  things to all people and seek government funding for it. 
  That’s just my opinion.
            But then again, I look like Max Headroom here.
            MR. YOUNG:  Our point is there’s lots of options
  and they’re all in consideration.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Yeah, and just to clarify a few
  things, I mean, you’re creating these use cases at the
  request of people who want to use the system, so
  essentially you’re making available the technology and the
  structure to those who want to use it.  It’s not that
  anyone has to use it who doesn’t want to use it.
            MR. YOUNG:  No, quite.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  And it goes beyond what the US
  Copyright Office does because it actually lets people go
  onto the Hub to ask for and receive a license.
            MR. YOUNG:  Well, I think the important point is
  the Hub points them in the right direction and it sets up
  the means, the structured language, by which they can make
  that request directly to the person or the service that
  has the ability to offer that license.  So, they won’t be
  asking the Hub for anything.  So, they might be asking a
  picture agency or Fox or --
            MR. GORDON:  So, you’re saying structured
  language.  You’re saying the Copyright Hub has sort of a
  template contract that -- a template license agreement
  that the -- that both parties are agreeing to.  There’s
  really no negotiation.
            MR. YOUNG:  No.  No, no, no.  We’re absolutely
  not setting the terms of trade.  But if you want to ask
  the question, can I use this photo on my website, and you
  want that to be possible by machine, there has to be a
  little bit of structure around the way that’s formatted,
  just so that they understand each other.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  Yeah, but let’s ask the question,
  and that is if you aren’t registering with the Copyright
  Office today, why are you registering with the Copyright
  Hub.  In other words, how will this address the dramatic
  delta between that which is registered and that which
  should be with this project?  In other words, I really
  like what you’re doing, but I’m not sure that it can’t be
  achieved just as well with a registry.
            MR. SEDLIK:  Huge difference there between
  registration with a registry or registration with, let’s
  say, the US Copyright Office.  So, you register -- for a
  creator to register with the US Copyright Office, that
  creator is looking to be able to recoup his or her
  attorneys’ fees in the event that there’s an infringement. 
  That creator is looking for the possibility of getting
  statutory -- or having statutory damages available in the
  event of an infringement.  And they might not even use
  those statutory damages.  They might go for actual damages
  and disgorged profits.  They’re looking to create a public
  record of their copyright ownership.
            But, you know, I have to disagree with the
  earlier comments that the current Copyright Office system
  provides some kind of effective way to find the owner of
  works.  I think I’m paraphrasing there and perhaps
  incorrectly, but really if you look at one of my
  registrations, it will say Jeff Sedlik’s photographs from
  1989 through 1996, miscellaneous, 20,000 unpublished
  images.
            Well, if you have a photograph, how are you
  going to get in -- you can’t see any of the deposits. 
  There’s no way to search it.  You can search by my name,
  or if you have a copyright registration number, you can
  search by that, but there is not now nor will there likely
  ever be a way to go in and search by image recognition,
  for example, into that past archive, because those
  registration deposits came in in all different types of
  formats, you know, registration of photographs on video,
  registration on proof sheets, registration in PDFs,
  registration of the images themselves, all sorts of
  things.
            So, you know, on a go-forward basis, the current
  electronic registration system would be perfect for image
  recognition search.  At least it will get you in the
  ballpark.  But, you know, when you register with a
  registry such as the Copyright Hub or PLUS Coalition or
  similar registries, you’re looking to be found.  You’re
  looking to be found, and also you’re looking to make your
  rights information, whether that’s an offer to license or
  existing rights that you’ve already granted, you’re
  looking to make that discoverable so that people can make
  -- people and machines can make informed decisions about
  making use of your work.
            And when we created PLUS Coalition, we were
  really -- we thought we could do it as just creators, as
  you suggested.  In fact, that’s what Marybeth Peters and I
  think David Carson were suggesting back in the day, you
  creators need to get together and do something or you’re
  going to be out of luck.
            Well, we quickly realized that we actually
  needed to bring in the publishers, the museums, the
  libraries, the ad agencies, the design firms, bring
  everybody into one big organization or one coalition
  that’s very diverse, that has balanced governance, is
  neutral and it’s nonprofit so we could come up with a
  language for communicating rights and then a hub system,
  which we call a registry for public discussion, but it’s
  really a hub system that, for example, the UK Copyright
  Office can ping us and say, well, who does this image
  belong to, and we could respond back with an ID or with
  detailed metadata, et cetera.
            To do that, we elected to go the nonprofit
  route, while making it completely open for commercial use. 
  So, any commercial entity can ask questions, can push
  information to it, can create other hubs that connect to
  it.  And I think that -- in that route, you get the best
  of both worlds.
            MR. REED:  Having made the comment about the
  Copyright Office earlier, I just wanted to clarify that,
  you know, the registry -- I agree with everything you just
  said about the problems with the Copyright Office system
  for photographers and really any -- for any challenges,
  problems, frustrations, for really anything other than
  textual works, right, literary works, because it’s an
  entirely text-based system.
            All I meant to say was that, you know, that is
  the legal record of copyright ownership in the United
  States, and anyone who registers gets a registration
  number.  And I see the value of a hub being tying all
  these bits of information together.  So, if you take --
  you know, if I’m a photographer and I have a bunch of
  copyright registration data that’s as you described, that
  is to say pretty useless, it just has a, you know, range
  of dates and a number of images and things like that, but
  I also register with PLUS, somewhere, there should be this
  -- you know, my view of what a good hub would be is
  putting all that information together, so it says that my
  PLUS registration number equates to this registration
  number, and I think in the PLUS spec you have a field for
  copyright registration number, right?
            MR. SEDLIK:  Copyright registration from any
  country.
            MR. REED:  Yeah.  So, that’s all I meant to say
  by that is that there is a database that exists.  It’s far
  from complete.  It’s far from perfect, but we need to keep
  that in mind, I think, as we continue this conversation.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  If I’m understanding correctly,
  part of the distinction that we’re talking about is that
  just a registry of works and owners versus something that
  connects you to licensing opportunities and gives you
  terms of use.
            Dominic, I don’t know if you --
            MR. YOUNG:  I was going to say you hit the nail
  on the head, which is that really what the Hub is about is
  creating connections between pieces of content and
  information about pieces of content so that business or
  whatever sort of interaction that wants to happen can
  happen.  And that’s kind of it, actually.
            And the other point just worth making, being
  British, is there’s no equivalent of the Copyright Office
  and official registrations in -- well, certainly not in
  Britain.  And that highlights the point firstly that the
  hub has to be architected to be, you know, a federation of
  hubs, lots of hubs, that interconnect.  You can’t say
  there is one solution.  The law is different.  The formal
  bodies are different.  And, actually, national interests
  dictate that they want to have control of their national
  sort of economic assets.  And, so, the architecture is
  absolutely built to be implemented as suits in any given
  environment.
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  Shira, I think what we’re all
  talking about is the same thing, and that’s finding the
  rights holder for a specific book, movie, whatever.  And I
  think that that’s -- you’re doing a terrific job there,
  but what about collective licensing in the United States?
            I mean, we’ve tried, we’ve advocated for it. 
  The Copyright Office and the Register at the time was very
  pro the Google settlement registry, and I know the climate
  may not be the best right now in the -- on the Hill to get
  collective licensing.  It’s one of our legislative
  priorities.  We’ve gone on the Hill and asked for it.  We
  feel that the stakeholders could sit down and talk and
  agree on limited uses that a collective license would
  suffice.  And we could have some money coming in to the
  various rights holders.
            Does anybody on the panel think that there’s the
  hill-of-beans chance that that will happen in our
  lifetime?
            MR. GRIFFIN:  Well, yeah, look, I think they’re
  willing to rubber stamp an agreement.  I think where you
  have different people taking different views on it it’s
  going to be more difficult, but I have more hope.  And,
  furthermore, it’s not just about a statutory collective
  license; it’s also about a voluntary collective license.
            I mean, look, when I heard Gene talk this
  morning, Gene Mopsik, you know, saying, look, nobody wants
  to pay for a photograph, I thought to myself, well,
  neither do they want to pay for a photocopy, but CCC gets
  them to do it and raises a handsome amount of money to
  make it happen.  And they did so not with a statute but
  with a court ruling, shortly after, I think, it was Texaco
  vs. Geophysical -- American Geophyiscal Union.
            I’m told more than three-quarters of all public
  librarians took out licenses for their public photocopy
  machines, put a lot of money into CCC’s pocket, which they
  divide very fairly and have created -- well, Gene, you
  could be concerned about how fair it is, but they’re doing
  their very, very best at CCC.
            And I will say that I have hope for this sort of
  a solution much more than I do about the idea that we will
  control the quantity and destiny of digits and restore
  supply and demand economics to the business.  That’s not
  going to happen.  So, I have a lot more hope for this, and
  I’ll sort of conclude it by saying that get your
  collective license while you can, establish it now while
  you can, because music’s headed towards having the
  significance of a photocopy, too, as are photographs, and
  we either collect that money at the gateways or we get it
  not at all.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Michael.
            MR. HEALY:  God forbid this should turn into a
  discussion about CCC and the fairness of our
  distributions.  That’s not an avenue anyone wants to go
  down.  But, you know, to Jim’s point, voluntary collective
  licensing has been in place via CCC since, what 1978 or
  so.  In the last seven or eight years, we’ve distributed
  back to rights holders something in the region of $1.3
  billion.  And some of that comes on a pay-per-use
  transactional basis in a portal very similar, admittedly
  just for the tech space that Caroline and Dominic and
  others envisage.  And we’re organized on a nonprofit
  basis.  So, it can work, it does work in the tech sector.
            But what we haven’t really addressed yet and we
  may in this conversation is the cross-sectoral element,
  because that seems to be a critical piece of the
  discussion.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Yes.  And, I mean, I think to
  the extent that -- we probably would all agree that the
  value of the Copyright Hub or something similar to the
  Copyright Hub is to essentially fill gaps where there
  isn’t already an existing adequate structure, whether it’s
  through voluntary or statutory collective licensing,
  whether it’s through individual negotiations of high-value
  licenses, and maybe in each country what’s needed and what
  the gaps are will be somewhat different.
            Let me pose the question to the extent that
  there is value in a copyright hub in the United States
  whether it’s through adapting the one that exists or doing
  something different.  How would you reconcile that with
  the value of and the need for global licensing in the
  sense of technically do we try to -- well, I mean, maybe
  the predicate question is to ask also Dominic and
  Caroline, I assume that the licenses that are granted
  through the use of the Hub are for UK uses only, but they
  can go to people outside the UK, but the use itself is
  granted for the UK.
            MR. YOUNG:  The use itself can be granted for
  whatever the licensor and licensee want to agree.  There’s
  nothing in the structure of the Hub that limits it.  If an
  identifier connects you to a licensor who only has rights
  to license that content in the UK, then doubtless they
  would only offer licenses that are for that purpose.  And
  they might even -- hopefully they will -- connect onwards
  to another licensor who has rights for a different
  territory, if that’s what you want.
            Maybe they’ll get so clever that they can work
  together behind the scenes and make that invisible to the
  user who can just still get the license they want to do
  the thing they want and not worry about, you know, which
  bit of the world they had to talk to organizations in.
            The Hub itself has no view on that.  What the
  Hub does is connect the licensee to a licensor and give
  their machines a language to talk so that they can
  negotiate that stuff between themselves.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, in theory today, a US user
  could use the Hub to get a license for rights in the US
  from a US right holder?
            MR. YOUNG:  There’s nothing architecturally to
  prevent that.  That’s really down to the players in the
  market, the people who have the rights and the people who
  want the rights doing whatever it is they’re authorized to
  do.  And the interesting point it raises actually is the
  trust question, how do you know the guy offering you the
  rights actually has the rights he’s claiming to offer you,
  which is one of the big work streams we’ve got going on
  right now.
            MR. GORDON:  That’s definitely something that my
  clients would be concerned with because they are not
  willing to, for example, go and obtain a photo from some
  of these popup photo houses because the indemnity that
  they give or the cap on liability is the amount that they
  pay for the image.  So, there’s no indemnity.  That’s why
  they go to Getty; that’s why they go to Corbis, because we
  get sort of, you know, millions of dollars of insurance to
  back up the indemnity obligations.
            To the extent that there’s no verification, that
  the folks claiming that they own the copyright in the
  content, I think that I’m -- I think that my clients are
  just left to status quo, which is go to the majors,
  because we know that we’re going to get the rights.  Go to
  Fox; go to Universal; go to Sony/ATV, because ultimately
  that’s where we know that we’re going to get a level of
  comfort and trust that the folks who claim they own it own
  the content that they’re licensing us.
            MR. YOUNG:  Exactly.  Trust is essential.  First
  of all, you need to know the person you’re buying from is
  able to back up whatever guarantee they’re offering you. 
  And, secondly, you need to know who you’re buying from,
  which quite often on the Internet is quite a hard thing to
  know.  So, these are the questions we’re considering,
  because you’re quite right.  Why would you ever trust --
  all of copyright works on assertions.  I told you I took
  that picture of Richard Hooper; how do you know that’s
  true?  I might not have done.  It might have been Caroline
  and I’ve just ripped her off.
            MR. GORDON:  So, I guess my question is if we’re
  not -- if the only ones that we really trust are the major
  players and they already have infrastructure, then what’s
  the additional benefit?
            MR. YOUNG:  If it is impossible for anyone to
  ever trust anyone other than the major players, then no
  one else will succeed in the market.  So, it’s a challenge
  for anyone trying to enter the market.  And to a lesser
  extent, it’s a challenge for the Hub to try to make sure
  that trust exists.
            You cannot rely on information that you can’t
  verify, particularly not when you are taking commercial
  decisions that might have much more expensive consequences
  if it turns out to be wrong.  It’s fundamental to the
  operation of the marketplace.  If I buy a license from CCC
  and it turns out they sold me something they shouldn’t
  have done, then I expect them to make that good for me one
  way or the other, and they will.  And to function in the
  market, you have to make that offer to your customers
  regardless of what you’re doing, kind of in any market,
  actually.  And that is a fundamental part of what we’re
  thinking about.
            As it happens, since we’re really focusing on it
  now, because we’re getting towards the end of the
  technology development and towards the start of
  implementation, it’s a very good moment for anyone who has
  views on this and input to be giving it to us because
  we’ve done a lot of thinking of our own, which we’re happy
  to share, and also we’d love to have more examples of
  areas where we might need to think a bit more.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Let me throw out one more
  question to the panel, and then we’ll open it up to a
  general discussion with the audience.  So, we’ve heard
  some description from Dominic about what the UK
  Government’s role was in this project, so obviously it
  emanated from a government-sponsored report that looked at
  the status of the marketplace and saw some gaps, and then
  there was a convening process where people were brought
  together to discuss and put in a room and told to try to
  come up with some solutions and some ideas.  Then this was
  created as -- and correct me if I misstate anything -- it
  was created as an entity run by the private sector but
  with government -- some sort of government advisory role
  on the board, I think.
            MR. YOUNG:  There’s an informal -- Ros Lynch is
  a member of our advisory board, so she comes and listens
  and gives us input.  She has no formal role.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  And Ros is now the head of the
  --
            MR. YOUNG:  She’s now --
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  -- of the IP -- of the
  Copyright Division of the UK IPO.
            MR. YOUNG:  Exactly so.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  And then the government is
  supplying some funding through the Digital Catapult of the
  technology itself.  So, there’s a number of different
  things the government there has done.  So, we’ve had a
  theme throughout the day partly because we’re all thinking
  in the Department of Commerce about what can we do to be
  helpful in this space.  The theme has been what should the
  government role be.  Of course, in this country, there
  tends to be an assumption that the market will be handled
  by the private sector; the government’s role will be
  limited.
            So, it would be interesting to hear the
  perspective.  We’re assuming we’re not talking about the
  government setting up a project like this or running a
  project like this or even regulating it.  We’re talking
  about something that would be primarily a private sector
  venture.
            So, if we could have some discussion and hear
  people’s views on the government -- the value of the
  government for doing any of the following things:  the
  convening role, the kind of thing we’re even doing here
  today; the advising role, like having a seat -- an
  advisory seat on a board of an organization like this or
  whatever the functional equivalent would be; the role of
  what some people are calling prodding or bullying, like
  cracking the whip a bit and saying you must do something,
  you’ve got to find some solutions; some sort of funding.
            And what’s possible for us to do in the
  Department of Commerce, I don’t know, but would that be
  something useful or advisable along the lines of what the
  UK Government has done.  And then, finally, of course,
  there’s the possibility which the Copyright Office talked
  about in their report and Jacqueline talked about and some
  people talked about on the panels today of establishing
  various types of incentives for participation without
  requiring it.  So, I’d just open the floor to any thoughts
  you might have.
            MR. SEDLIK:  Well, one difference between Europe
  and the United States, one of the many, is that the
  European Commission has decided that this is an important
  challenge to tackle.  So, they’re dedicating hundreds of
  millions of Euros in grants to public and private sector
  initiatives to address this issue, you know, to figure out
  what’s a common language that can be used for machines to
  talk about rights between each other.  That’s -- to figure
  out how to link registries together; to just bring
  stakeholders together to talk about the issue toward
  solving some of these problems.
            And you don’t really see that -- those kinds of
  dollars coming down the pike here.  In fact, you know,
  PLUS exists because of the government, of the Copyright
  Office coming to industry and going, you need to address
  this issue, and that’s why I’m sitting here today.
            So, when my wife asked me why I’m sitting here
  today, you know, running a nonprofit doing this, is, you
  know, it’s basically because the Copyright Office said
  this needs to be done to solve a problem in your industry,
  because there’s a big tidal wave coming.
            And, so, I do think that it needs to be solved
  on an international level, though as I mentioned earlier,
  in looking at the law, you know, and at licensing, you
  know, you can get rights for work either by agreement, by
  policy, or by law, and it’s different in every country. 
  You know, here we have fair use; in the UK, they have fair
  dealing.  They’re quite different.
            So, what it really has to be is what rights are
  being offered and -- or what rights are being requested,
  or what rights are being claimed.  You know, in the PLUS
  registry, we allow somebody to come forward and say, I
  have the right to do this under -- you know, under these
  parameters or under the law in this country, et cetera. 
  They can file a claim as a licensee rather than just
  relying on the licensor.
            Part of the problem in the photography space is
  that -- is the distribution network for images or the
  marketplace.  So, you have -- for a royalty-free image,
  which is an image that you can download and pay for -- pay
  a license for based upon size, you have a creator, and
  then you might have a copyright owner that is different
  than the creator, and then you might have 100, 200, 500,
  1,000 or more licensors, distributors of that same exact
  work.  So, you have a fundamental challenge there when it
  comes to registries.  You’ve got to be able to point
  people back to all the resources, or if there’s an ID
  involved, point them back to wherever -- whichever
  resource or whichever source that ID belongs to.
            So, there are a lot of challenges there that I
  think have to be addressed by international cooperation
  and also with the close participation of government, you
  know, and we meet with the Copyright Office regularly
  several times a year to ask for feedback and provide
  updates, and I think that’s exactly what needs to happen.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  I got to say, one of the biggest
  roles of government in this is eating the sins of
  antitrust.  I mean, there’s no question that antitrust is
  one of the very biggest issues that affects our industries
  when they meet together, when we sit down.  We even have
  extra antitrust attorneys present.  It’s a real full
  employment act for competitions attorneys.  And it’s
  necessary that in some way government assist us in
  overcoming those issues, if we’re to overcome them.
            And every government is different, and ours is
  remarkably different because we have statutory damages of
  $150,000 an incident.  So, that raises the stakes
  dramatically over what we might find in the UK.  And with
  all these cultures so different, certainly the role of
  government is dramatically different in China, and yet who
  would undergo such a project without wanting to entice the
  Chinese?
            And, so, yes, government is critical; yes, it
  needs to play a role, but certainly in America, if not
  many other places, again, we are the taxi commissioner and
  we are seen as extraordinarily suspect.
            MR. HEALY:  Could I just -- I was interested
  that today was organized in the morning to focus on issues
  like the interoperability of metadata and standard
  identifiers because I feel I’ve been listening and talking
  about this my entire life.  And I was reflecting -- and I
  have the lines to prove it.  But I was reflecting, you
  know, I met people like Larry and Paul and Mark Bide I
  think in 1999, talking about exactly these issues.  And
  they simply won’t go away.
            And there is a role for government in
  stimulating a debate, convening the participants to talk
  about issues such as these.  You know, we heard about the
  Linked Content Coalition; we heard about the RDI project. 
  The European Commission played an important role,
  actually, in stimulating a debate about that.  And I know
  we all enjoy poking fun at bureaucracies like the European
  Commission, and, God, it’s easy to do, isn’t it?
            But they did something very valuable there, and
  something about the Hub’s architecture has sat on the
  shoulders of that effort, and that’s very important.  And,
  Shira, what you’ve done today is valuable, I think, for
  that very same reason.  I just hope we can, you know,
  break some of this stuff out into the real world, because
  it still feels, after 25 years in this, that you can fit
  the number of people talking about this into a small bus
  still, after all this time.  And it’s got to become
  mainstream, and I think perhaps government can play an
  important role in that respect.
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  I agree with Michael, but I
  would like to say that we, the authors, respond to
  carrots, not sticks, and if the government gives us $34
  million dollars, we will solve the problems of copyright, you
  know, within the next two months.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Why 34 million?
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  Well, that’s what we were
  going to get from Google in our settlement.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Oh, oh.
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  I just picked a number out of
  the air.  That’s all.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Oh.
            MR. HEALY:  A lot of that was going for me for
  my salary, do you remember?
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  Well, that’s true, yeah. 
  Well, we’ll deduct a thousand from that, and then it will
  be -- but seriously, I do think the conversations need to
  move towards implementation.  I really feel that the
  libraries have to be brought into the conversation, too,
  because there’s all sorts of issues involving libraries. 
  I think that authors -- I agree with Jim that creators
  have to run the show.  It can’t be, you know, others
  taking the money and leaving creators out, as Rick
  explained it this morning.  And I think the government can
  help us get to that point with a stick or two on the other
  side of the table.  And I think the roundtables that the
  Copyright Office had and this particular conference is --
  you know, is certainly going in the right direction.
            MR. GORDON:  I would agree with Jan.  I think
  that the government can play a sort of limited role.  What
  I would like to see that the government role be is, one,
  education, because ultimately it’s all of the majors who
  already know all of this.  It’s the small fringes; it’s
  the periphery who isn’t educated who doesn’t know sort of
  what to do and how to register.  So, I think that would be
  helpful.
            Also, second, possibly some -- developing some
  mechanism of verification to avoid everyone claiming that
  they own rights and content that they don’t own.  And,
  third, working with the existing framework for
  enforcement, you know, making sure that we have, you know,
  continued protection under the Digital Millennium
  Copyright Act safe harbor provisions, that we have
  continued protection under the Communications Decency Act. 
  So, I want to ensure that the existing framework isn’t
  drastically changed simply by injecting government into
  this dialog.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Well, Chris, I think you’re the
  only one who hasn’t spoken.
            MR. REED:  I think, one, to sort of echo, I
  think, what my fellow panelists have said.  I think a
  couple other areas, though, or just to expand on a couple
  of points is, you know, and dialogs like this are very
  useful.  I also think sort of laying the landscape,
  setting landscapes on what is happening now in each of
  these industries is very helpful, and that’s why, I think,
  people found the Copyright Office report and Jacqueline’s
  talk this morning to be very beneficial is they went out
  as sort of a neutral fact-finder and figured out what’s
  going on in that space and then sort of wrote a report
  about it.  So, it’s well documented, so that to the extent
  people want to pick that up and create new systems around
  it, they know what’s already been done and what’s out
  there and how systems may talk to other systems and things
  like that.
            And then the other -- on your education point, I
  just wanted to follow up, and I think one of the real
  pieces of value that the UK Hub brings is trying to bring
  back the social norms of licensing for uses that need to
  be licensed.  And I know one of you made the comment that
  you’re trying to get people to do the right thing, and I
  think that’s hugely important and it could be a real
  central role in this, is making it -- I think Gene Mopsik
  used the phrase “frictionless licensing” a lot in the
  context of photography.  And that’s true, you know, that
  the more you make that a reality, the more likely people
  are to license that which they need to be licensing in the
  first place.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Thank you to the panel.  Let’s
  open it now to the audience and have a more general
  discussion.  If people can go up to the mic, that would be
  great, and identify yourself.
            Sorry, we know who you are.  You spoke this
  morning.
            MR. ISHERWOOD:  Hi, Mark Isherwood, here
  representing the DDEX Secretariat.  I just really wanted
  to make a comment because there was part of the panel
  conversation where I started to twitch uncomfortably. 
  There is a fundamental and very important difference
  between automated and automatic, particularly when it
  comes to licensing.
            What the Copyright Hub and other organizations
  are trying to do is to automate the process on an opt-in
  basis.  You don’t have to do it, but it’s there if you
  want it.  It’s certainly not getting into the region of
  automatic licenses, which I know makes all the lawyers
  twitch as soon as somebody uses that phrase.
            And I think it’s -- I only make the point
  because I think terminology in these conversations is
  really vital, and that’s just one of those
  differentiations which I think is really important.  And
  we can’t -- and we mustn’t lose sight of it in the
  conversation, otherwise we do descend down a wormhole that
  we will never come out of.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Thank you.
            MR. BAND:  So, I’m Jonathan Band.  I’m here on
  behalf of the Library Copyright Alliance.  So, in these --
  in all these conversations about online licensing, one of
  the large concerns we have is, you know, the potential
  impact on fair use.  And, so, whether it manifests itself
  in the form of, you know, is this a covert road to
  extended collective licensing or is this having all these
  micro-payments possible, is it a way of eliminating -- you
  know, addressing the fourth factor in the fair use
  analysis.  So, we’re always very concerned about these
  conversations.
            In the morning, I felt pretty good, because it
  seemed -- you know, it was a very technical conversation
  in talking about standard definitions, it talked about
  interoperability, very focused obviously on the specific
  problems of the music industry in this country and all the
  complexity of the way it’s structured.  And, so, I felt
  okay.  I felt this is not really threatening the interests
  of libraries and their users.
            And then we had this afternoon’s conversation,
  which I frankly have found quite alarming.  And what I
  found very alarming is in the presentation about the
  Copyright Hub that it seemed -- you know, the examples
  were about educational uses or personal uses and that
  those were the kinds of uses that should be licensed.  And
  then, you know,  when Shira was sort of introducing this
  panel, talking about low-value uses, and I say, okay, I
  get in the morning when we were talking about, you know,
  commercial works and commercial uses, you know, that makes
  sense, I get that.
            But when you start talking about low-value uses,
  I say, okay, they’re talking about me, you know, they’re
  talking about what my people are doing.  And, so, you
  know, I know there’s been a few references to fair use
  during the course of this panel, but, you know, my
  ultimate point here is that we’re very worried that this
  discussion sort of leads to a place where fair use is
  undermined.  I mean, we’re comfortable where fair use in
  this country is now.  I know some of you on the panel are
  not, and the fact that you like -- 
            MS. CONSTANTINE:  We will be.
            MR. BAND:  -- and the fact that you like all
  this makes -- is also alarming to me.  But, you know, the
  bottom line is, you know, you have to -- you know, there’s
  a lot of skepticism in the library community about where
  this could end up.  Thank you.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Let me just make one
  observation, which is since you mentioned that I referred
  to low-value uses, I would not consider low-value uses to
  be at all coextensive with fair uses.  So, just -- you
  know, let me just make that point.
            And I don’t know, Dominic, if you wanted to say
  anything about that, because we’ve had some conversations,
  in fact, about exactly this issue.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  There’s something I want to say
  about it, too, so go ahead.
            MR. YOUNG:  About libraries.  Well, one point we
  should have made about the use cases is that our 70-plus
  use cases at the moment come from the public sector,
  including libraries, including people like the British
  Library through commercial operators, massive companies
  through to individual creators.  The Hub itself has no
  ideology about the ways in which people ought to use the
  law, what’s the right or wrong way for libraries or anyone
  else to be set up, et cetera, or to anything else.
            All we’re saying is if we can facilitate and
  make much cheaper processes that are otherwise difficult
  or expensive, then we think we can help create innovation
  across sectors.  And I think we should have a longer
  conversation about libraries because I’m not picking up
  that same sense of concern from the libraries I am
  speaking to.  And, so, if it exists, then that’s
  definitely the next person I should be speaking to.
            Mr. GRIFFIN:  I’ll just say that I am all for
  the balance.  I mean, no question about it, I’m for the
  balance and I support fair use.  But I’ve got this equal
  concern, really an equal concern that we are essentially
  leaving the stuff of life to a tip jar, you know, that
  we’ve made it voluntary to pay for art, knowledge,
  culture, and this is the stuff of life.  This is the stuff
  that makes life worth living.
            And, so, while I’m extraordinarily sympathetic,
  and I’m not arguing for locks and keys or anything that
  restricts anyone’s access to this wonderful stuff, I think
  we got to find a way to balance this as a society and pay
  for it.  So, I think when we speak, say, about a voluntary
  collective license, that kind of a discussion should be
  entirely welcome to you, Jonathan, because it does strike
  a balance.  It says we care and we’ll get you money and
  we’ll set it aside and we’ll do our best to create an
  incentive to make the stuff, that we love, but neither
  will we leave it to a tip jar.  We’re not just going to
  leave it to be entirely voluntary to pay.
            And yet I don’t see an alternative, frankly. 
  Locks and keys or voluntary to pay?  What will you do? 
  You have to in some way collect enough money to
  incentivize the creation of more great stuff.  So, I’m
  with you, but I’m also extraordinarily sympathetic to the
  need to monetize the inevitable anarchy that is developing
  every single day.  And that is a very, very tough spot to
  be in.
            And the songwriters, they have actually given us
  a path.  They’ve shown us that they are willing to accept
  pools of money with some kind of a fair split.  They just
  really want it to be a fair split, you know?  They don’t
  want the wool pulled over their eyes and there to be
  absolutely no registries at all that guide this money into
  an essentially black box of unattributed income, where
  then it does not emerge for them at all.
            So, I hope you understand that we’re not up here
  running a notion that we should condition access to
  culture on one’s ability to pay; quite the opposite. 
  We’re trying to understand how best to balance that.  And
  if the least we could do is to come up with a way to
  figure out who created it and when and how to find them, I
  think that’s a good balance.
            MR. GORDON:  I want to point out that I wasn’t
  actually concerned about the low-value -- the low-value
  licenses because I view that content as the ones that, you
  know, some creative person found on the Internet and
  actually wants to pay for.  So, I don’t view it as sort of
  like an encroachment on fair use but rather an opportunity
  for those social media, that user-generated content to
  actually be compensated for.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Let’s let another --
            MR. LANNOM:  I was wondering how this comment
  was going to fit in.
            MR. SEDLIK:  I have one more comment.  Sorry,
  Larry.
            Jonathan, you know, you and I have been talking
  about PLUS for the entire time that PLUS has existed.  I
  just have to point out, you know, the purpose of this
  particular day is to discuss efficient online licensing is
  the title of the program.  I think that I would be glad to
  come back to talk about efficient distribution of works,
  you know, fair and open access and how -- the role that
  registries can play in that.
            You know, and the reason that the libraries are
  participating in our initiative and in PLUS and hold a
  director’s seat and the museums, as well, is because they
  can use this registry information to ensure that there’s
  no perceived liability on the part of the public to make
  use of images that are distributed, that currently the
  public -- or the public sees images and they wonder, well,
  can I use this or can I not, and the museums want people
  to know, yes, go ahead, use it for anything, it’s
  available.  And registries can perform that function very
  effectively, as well.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Go ahead, Larry.
            MR. LANNOM:  So, at the risk of sort of
  interrupting what was a great conversation, I feel the
  need to point out something about government and make a
  little plug for government.  So, we’re talking about using
  the Internet, which came out of DARPA; we’re talking about
  using the worldwide web, which came out of CERN.  The
  technology I represent here, the Handle system, which is
  used by many of the people in the room is paid for by
  DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Library of
  Congress in sequence.
            If Dominic gets his wish and the Hub disappears
  and goes into something else, then that will also have
  been a nice prototype project like the ARPANET was.  This
  is something that government can do.  They can start
  stuff.  They can have time horizons more than a couple of
  years, more than a quarter of the report, and they can do
  things that then later get taken up and privatized.  This
  happens all the time and you shouldn’t think it might not
  happen here.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Thank you.
            Gene?
            MR. MOPSIK:  Yeah, Gene Mopsik.  First, I want
  to say I agree 100 percent with Mr. Headroom’s comments
  regarding fair use, but what I wanted to do was address
  Jim’s earlier question about registration and why would
  someone register.  And what we’ve been trying to do for a
  number of years is to incorporate copyright registration,
  and the earlier thinking was deposit into a orphan works
  registry into photographer DAM workflow so that you didn’t
  have to leave your workflow when you ingest a job.  There
  would be an action within the work flow that would say,
  okay, I want to register this number of images.
            Well, with that same action, you could register
  those with the Copyright Office, you could send them to a
  registry, you could send them in any direction you wanted
  once you had the appropriate metadata for registration
  within them.
            So, in my mind, one of the reasons besides cost
  that registration is so low right now is that
  photographers in particular, it’s just one more thing they
  have to do.  And, again, they have to leave their
  customary workflow in order to do it.  If it were easier,
  I think it would happen in greater numbers.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  I’m totally with you, and I’ve had
  this dialog with the people at the Copyright Office, and
  there’s a fundamental difference between what you just
  said and what they believe.  And that is that they believe
  they issue presumptively valid copyrights, and they do not
  allow you just to submit something and get a copyright for
  it.  And, in fact, what people are doing is walking down
  the street taking pictures of people in clothes and
  dresses and then claiming the picture is a copyright on
  the underlying thing, which is the clothes or the dress,
  and other things, you know, that lack creativity and that
  don’t entitle one to a copyright.
            Now, I happen to be with you.  I say let’s make
  it fast, easy, and simple.  I don’t think we need to pass
  judgment on what is copyrightable and what’s not when it
  comes to be registered.  I say that -- save that for the
  trial if you want.  And, in fact, I would support a two-
  level system, which was copyright-heavy prior to
  litigation and copyright-light, like you’re describing,
  which would be incredibly inexpensive, close to marginal
  cost, something that could be easily done.
            But if you’re looking for the disconnect between
  today’s Copyright Office and what we are discussing now in
  your comments, it’s the difference between presumptively
  valid copyrights that are vetted by professionals in a
  setting that involves both cost and storage and so forth,
  which leads to a $55 tax on a copyright or higher and a
  13-month wait for it to come.
            And, again, I think there’s something to be said
  for that system.  I understand it, and I understand why
  the register feels the need to vet copyrights.  And that
  leads to a cost and a delay that we might find
  unacceptable when we look at it from a technology
  standpoint.  So, I just wanted to interject that so that
  you understood that it’s not that the Copyright Office is
  inept and couldn’t get this done.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Can we not get into issues
  about copyright registration, especially since the
  Copyright Office is no longer here?  Why don’t we go back
  to the topic of the online licensing marketplace and go to
  the next question.
            MS. SHANNON:  I’m Salley Shannon for ASJA.  We
  represent freelance journalists.  We are, like Rick
  Carnes, the originators of works and thank you for
  including us.
            I want to make an observation and then ask a
  question of Dominic and Catherine [sic].  First, I want to
  thank you, Jim, for reminding us of the shadow of
  antitrust when you were talking about government’s role,
  because that essentially overshadowed both Google
  settlements, and we were reminded of that shadow by the
  Justice Department many times.
            And then the question I have is that many of us
  here, Rick has said it, start with a creator.  Jan has
  echoed it, start with the creator.  You even said it, Jim,
  start with the creator; don’t start with the work.  So,
  have you folks -- excuse me.  As you folks have -- when
  you’re considering poetry and moving into the written
  word, have you considered registering the writers, the
  authors, and not the works themselves?
            MS. BOYD:  Yes, absolutely.  And one of the, I
  would say, use cases that we’re looking at deals with
  exactly that, because I think the moment between someone
  sitting down with an idea in their head and the work being
  fully formed, there was some technical term this morning
  that surprised me, actually, and I completely forget what
  it is, fixed, the moment between conception and fixation,
  that is the most important moment to capture.
            Now, we’re working with the ISNI IA to capture
  the creators, to have them registered, and to use those to
  help identify the work itself when that comes into being,
  and also to protect it during that process, because there
  are times young designers, young web designers, send out
  their work, they create something and they send out their
  work, they don’t see it again until it’s been used on a
  website.  That is how they feel.  Many people feel that
  way when they’ve done something.  But if you have
  something in the interim to just say, hey, you can
  actually trace it back to me, that’s cool.  But the
  identification through the authors of the work, I think,
  is incredibly important.
            MR. YOUNG:  The three things we think about
  identifying are entities, which includes authors,
  licenses, and pieces of content.  And they’re the players
  in the game.  Actually, one of our use cases is from an
  individual poet who wants to set up his own registry.
            Now, you know, I should add he’s almost one of
  the foremost technical architects of this process, but
  actually it is possible if someone wants to, in the same
  way as you can set up a web server, if you really want for
  somebody to do that and to create their own registry and
  to -- their own repository and to manage their rights
  themselves, I personally think it’s more likely that the
  clever entrepreneurs will set up services to help them do
  that or maybe industry groups or collecting societies or
  other people in different parts of the world.  But it’s
  entirely possible to do that.  And if you’re an author or
  maybe a collector of authors, you might choose to do that.
            We have another use case from a group of
  individual freelance photographers who are loosely
  organized and see the opportunity to do something to get a
  better grip on their work.  And, so, we’re working with
  them, too.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, sorry, we do have a queue
  of people to speak.
            MR. GRIFFIN:  I just want to say really quickly
  in the followup to that, and it’s very quick, and that is
  that I was involved with an effort at WIPO that made the
  mistake of focusing on intermediaries, amongst other
  things, and the answers we got were entirely like Chris’,
  which is, no, we’re from Fox, we don’t need it; and, no,
  we’re from this record company, we don’t need it.
            And, so, if you focus on the intermediaries,
  you’ll get the message, we don’t need it.  You can try
  this out with Rick.  He wants it.  He’s a creator. 
  Creators want to crow about their creations.  Middlemen
  are like poker players who hold their cards very close to
  their vest.  Any effort that focuses on intermediaries and
  middlemen will fail.  Any effort that focuses on endpoints
  like creators and reporters will succeed.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, let me --
            MR. SEDLIK:  There’s a rather unique opportunity
  in the UK -- I’ll do it in one minute -- in that in the UK
  the orphan works amendment to copyright law there passed
  and went actually into effect last year.  So, anybody in
  the UK can use any creative work that they might happen to
  find for almost any purpose without contacting the rights
  holder if they try to find but fail to find the rights
  holder and pay a licensing fee to an agency of the
  government.
            And, so, there’s a huge fire under the buttocks
  of all creators in the UK to solve this problem, and that
  fire by extension is under all creators in all countries
  because when somebody in the UK finds my photograph of Big
  Ben, actually that’s just the clock, the Parliament Tower
  or the -- what’s the real name of it?  Yes, so when they
  find that photograph and assume that it’s a UK author and
  it’s not and I’m not found because -- I won’t be found
  until the UK Copyright Hub connects to a global hub or to
  a registry here in the United States.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  So, we are just about out of
  time.  Let me ask just one question, which is do we have
  anyone on the phone?
            MR. ROBINSON:  I was just asking.  I’m going to
  double check again.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Okay, so, let’s take -- I think
  we had two people who wanted to come up.
            UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  This has the feel of an
  auction.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  I know, sorry.
            UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  Let’s go to the phones.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  That’s the way we work when we
  do live webcasts.
            UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  It’s got the feel of
  commercial real retail activity.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  And yet it’s not commercials.
            Go ahead, go ahead.
            MS. PILCH:  Okay.  I am Janice Pilch, Copyright
  and Licensing Librarian at Rutgers University Libraries. 
  And I want to say that I didn’t find anything said this
  afternoon to be alarming.  I don’t think that any ideas
  expressed this afternoon or the idea of the Hub is
  incompatible with copyright limitations and exceptions. 
  We don’t -- it doesn’t mean that we would cut them out of
  the picture; it doesn’t mean that they would go away.
            On the other hand, as Rick Carnes said this
  morning, it all starts with creators.  And if we cut
  creators out of the picture, we’re not helping anything. 
  And that should be the primary thing that we think about
  in using works.
            Another thing I want to say is that I think that
  more education on all of this is really important and this
  would be an appropriate role for the government.  All the
  time, I am dealing with students who simply have no idea
  that they have to think about this stuff.  You mention the
  word “copyright;” they simply don’t know what you’re
  talking about.  And I urge the government to take on that
  role.  Thanks.
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  Thank you very much.
            So, on that note, let me thank the panel for an
  excellent conversation.
            (Applause).
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  And I’ll turn it over to John
  Morris, Associate Administrator and Director of Internet
  Policy at NTIA to close the program for the day.
                      CONCLUDING REMARKS
            MR. MORRIS:  And, panel, I’m just going to be
  two minutes, so why don’t you just hang out there.  It’s
  not going to be a 15-minute, you know, chat.
            Anyway, my role really right now is really to
  say thank you to everyone.  And, you know, and so, I mean,
  on behalf of Shira and me but really on behalf of NTIA and
  PTO and the Department of Commerce and now after this
  panel on behalf of the Taxi Commission --
            (Laughter).
            MR. MORRIS:  -- I really want to, you know, say
  thank you to all of the panelists.  The panelists and
  speakers were just amazing, I thought, this whole day. 
  But also thank you to the audience, because, I mean, in
  the end, this is an important set of issues that, you
  know, that -- well, I don’t know, it might be two buses
  full of people that are really working on this, but it
  really is an important set of issues that we need to make
  some progress on.  And at least for me, it was an
  extraordinarily and informative and interesting thing.
            So, I mean, can I just ask for kind of one last
  clap for all of the speakers, because I really just think
  they were...
            (Applause).
            MR. MORRIS:  And just to spend one minute on the
  kind of -- you know, the underlying question of what
  should the government do, you know, we have obviously
  heard a lot of different perspectives, you know, ranging
  from nothing at all to, you know, to a number of different
  ideas.  You know, certainly, you know, as Shira said
  earlier, I mean, it was never -- kind of it’s never been
  our idea that, you know, we would ride in and establish
  something and try to supplant all or any of the good work
  that is going on.
            But, you know, but we do keep hearing that there
  are, you know, maybe things that we can -- that we can
  push or we can promote or we can convene or we can
  facilitate and possibly even fund, God forbid, but, so, I
  mean, we are going to, you know, kind of take what we’ve
  heard today and go back and cogitate and think and, you
  know, have more informal conversations, I’m sure.  You
  know, we honestly haven’t figured out kind of what a next
  step is.  It could be something of asking for further, I
  don’t know, formal comment.  We’re frankly not yet sure.
            We really wanted to wait to hear what we heard
  today.  So, I mean, let me say that, you know, we will --
  you will hear from us more on this topic, as we think it
  through, but right now I’m not exactly sure how you’re
  going to hear from us.
            So, I mean, that’s really kind of all I wanted
  to say, Shira.  Is there anything you wanted to add before
  we wrap it up?
            MS. PERLMUTTER:  This was phenomenally
  interesting and educational, so thank you again to
  everyone.
            MR. MORRIS:  Yeah, so thanks very much, and
  that’s it.  Thanks.
            (Applause).
            (Whereupon, the open meeting was adjourned at
  4:05 p.m.)