CIAM International Partners Speak Up on Moral Rights for Music Creators
Last week, four authors’ rights organisations from both sides of the Atlantic issued an open letter to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), urging them to reconsider their recently stated position on moral rights for music creators. These organisations comprised two of CIAM’s international partners – Music Creators North America (MCNA) and the European Composer & Songwriter Alliance (ECSA) – as well as the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), and the MusicAnswers campaign.
Moral rights cover the right of an author to receive attribution and to protect the integrity and ownership of their work. They are a fundamental component of copyright protection and are included within the 1928 revision of the Berne Convention. But while 172 countries around the world have signed up to it, it is only the US that has refused to assert them to anything other than visual rights so far.
The letter expresses the disappointment felt over the recent RIAA comments to the Copyright Office in which they prioritised the inconvenience of dealing with accurate metadata over the principle of the protection of moral rights of the people upon whose work the music business is built. This position, the co-signees believe, fails to properly reflect the wishes of the music creator community that the RIAA aims to represent.
Moral rights adoption is supported by some politicians from both sides, but opposed by parts of the industry, which believes that they are not a priority. For example, in May 2017 the National Music Publishers Association declared that it “strongly supports the principle of attribution and integrity rights for songwriters and indeed all authors, but also strongly believes there is no compelling need for new moral rights legislation in the United States.”
From the perspective of music creators however, these rights have always been an essential element for inclusion in all nation’s legislation, including the USA. They were on the MCNA agenda from the organisation’s inception and have been the subject of multiple lobbying campaigns including one in collaboration with CIAM as long ago as March 2013. More recently MCNA also supported an open letter written by BASCA to RIAA where the importance of the right of attribution was stressed in relation to data accuracy and therefore fair compensation to creators.
“CIAM has always supported the adoption of moral rights,” said Lorenzo Ferrero, composer and president of CIAM. “In 2013, I addressed the opening cocktail reception of the CISAC Creators’ Summit in Washington with the observation that ‘apparently US creators were not yet created equal’ and it’s disappointing that we’re still fighting this battle more than four years later.”
The open letter sent yesterday closes with a request for the RIAA to work with the creator community to address the specific issues of metadata implementation as a means to preserve and enforce moral rights. It also urges the RIAA to present a united front in the common cause to protect the rights of music creators and those who represent their work.