Research and analysis

Collecting societies codes of conduct

Assessment of the costs and benefits of a code of conduct for collecting societies, their members and users.

• From: Intellectual Property Office
• Published: 7 December 2012

Documents

Collecting societies codes of conduct: executive summary

PDF, 438 KB, 13 pages

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Collecting societies codes of conduct

PDF, 1.09 MB, 58 pages

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Details

Collecting societies, also known as Collective Management Organisations, are organisations in charge of administering statutory copyright law via collective rights management. Collecting societies licence, gather and distribute royalties on behalf of the copyright owners they represent.

In October 2011, the Intellectual Property Office produced an initial impact assessment of the move to adopting a code of conduct for collecting societies. It set out that the main benefit from adopting a code will be improvements in collecting societies’ governance and transparency and the delivery of better information to both members and users.

It also listed a series of hypothetical benefits that could flow from this. This report interrogates the plausibility and extent of these hypothetical benefits through comparative analysis of the Australian collecting societies’ code of conduct adopted in 2002 and other models for the regulation of collecting societies used across Europe.

Authors: BOP Consulting, Benedict Atkinson, Brian Fitzgerald.

Published 7 December 2012