Ross Bagley, a partner in Pryor Cashman's Litigation and Intellectual Property Groups, spoke to Law360 about the likely landscape for copyright law in 2023.
In “Copyright & Trademark Policy To Watch in 2023,” Ross discussed Copyright Office policy toward works created with artificial intelligence (AI), noting that 2022 saw the agency and courts starting to address copyright issues for this type of IP: “All these questions have been swirling around for a while, but now they're finally getting posed to the Copyright Office and the courts. The discussion is going to develop a lot in 2023 and beyond.”
Ross also weighed in on the outlook for the royalty rate for physical and streaming music, which saw a notable increase at the end of 2022:
Bagley, the Pryor Cashman attorney, agreed that the rate increase will have a meaningful impact, saying it will be especially felt by publishers and songwriters for the next five years, particularly “with respect to genres and artists with fans who are audiophiles and collectors or are simply more comfortable consuming music from physical media.”
But the coming increase in interactive streaming mechanical royalty rates for services like Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music and YouTube will be more impactful, he said. The board is expected to finalize two new rates, one at 15.1% that will apply retroactively from 2018 through 2022, and another at 15.35% that will apply from 2023 through 2027. That's up from the prior rate of 10.5%.
Bagley said the new rates represent “a historic increase in royalties for songwriters and music publishers.”
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[Law360] Copyright & Trademark Policy To Watch in 2023
Originally published by Law360
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