“The European Union proposed changes to ease licensing rules that prevent Internet music stores, including Apple Inc.’s iTunes, from selling digital music across the 27-nation bloc,” Aoife White reports for Bloomberg.
“Royalty-collection societies could be forced under the draft rules to transfer their revenue-gathering activities to rivals if they lack the technical capacity to license music to Internet services in multiple countries,” White reports. “Music copyright licenses are granted on a national basis in the EU so consumers can only download music from an iTunes store in their home country. The EU has sought to promote pan-European licensing for years, and the commission issued an antitrust decision in 2008 against national agencies that collect royalties on behalf of artists.”
White reports, “Under current rules, European consumers ‘have less access to innovative services,’ EU Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier said today. ‘It’s not surprising that young consumers look elsewhere than the legal’ online music stores… Apple rolled out iTunes stores in Poland, Hungary and 10 other European countries last year, seven years since arriving in Germany, the U.K. and France. Obtaining licensing rights from publishers and royalty-collecting societies was an obstacle to opening stores in all EU nations, it said in 2009.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Better a decade late than never.
MacDailyNews Note: Currently, Apple’s iTunes Store is the only online music store available in all 27 EU member states.
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