MEIEA Summit 2025

              Greg Smith, Moderator
1:30 - Compilation Conundrum: The Federal Courts’ Split Views On What Constitutes a “Work” When Calculating Copyright Infringement Damages
2:00 - Collecting International Mechanical Royalties

Compilation Conundrum: The Federal Courts’ Split Views On What Constitutes a “Work” When Calculating Copyright Infringement Damages
  Stan Soocher, University of Colorado Denver
Section 504(c)(1) of the U.S. Copyright Act states that a “copyright owner may elect” to receive “an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work.” In determining the amount of a statutory award—which is based on the number of works infringed, rather than the number of times those works were infringed—“all parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work,” the statute adds.
Most federal appeals courts that have addressed the issue of what qualifies as a “compilation” or a single creative work have applied an “independent economic value” analysis that looks at the market worth of the single creation as of the time when an infringement occurred. However, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—which encompasses the music-history-rich jurisdictions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas—has recently rejected the “independent economic value” test in determining which individual sound recordings are §504(c)(1) “works” eligible for their own statutory awards and which are part of a compilation. The Fifth Circuit’s break with the judicial majority view aligns it with the minority position of the Second Circuit, which includes New York. This MEIEA presentation will delve into the federal appeals courts’ split on what amounts to a “work” for purposes of assessing copyright infringement damages, as well as into the enormous recovery implications in copyright cases involving the music industry and creative content owners.

Collecting International Mechanical Royalties
  Serona Elton, Frost School of Music at the University of Miami
Mechanical royalties are generated when a musical work (also known as a musical composition or song) is performed and recorded, and the resulting sound recording is reproduced and distributed as a physical record (e.g., vinyl, CD), a digital download, or an interactive stream. The term “mechanical” dates to the late 1890s and early 1900s when musical works were reproduced and distributed in the first mechanical devices such as piano rolls and music boxes and is still used when describing the digital files that most consumers access in order to enjoy music today. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1909 established both a copyright owner’s exclusive right to control mechanical uses of their music, and a limitation on the exclusive right referred to as a compulsory license. The Music Modernization Act (MMA) of 2018 amended the law with respect to the compulsory license, modernizing it to meet the needs of today. One key component of the MMA was the creation of a mechanical licensing collective, now known as The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC). Since it began operating in 2021, The MLC has collected and distributed over $2.5 billion dollars in digital mechanical royalties. These royalties have been collected from the U.S. operations of digital service providers operating under the newly modified blanket compulsory license. The MLC is prohibited by law from collecting digital mechanical royalties generated outside of the U.S., so its members (music publishers, publishing administrators, and self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists) must pursue alternate means of collecting their international mechanical royalties. This paper will explore what options exist for U.S.-based rightsholders when it comes to collecting this revenue, including the pros and cons of each.