After many years of work that began with the Public Hearing that took place in Brussels on November 13 and 14, 2000 and continued with the Commission Communication of April 16, 2004 on “The management of copyright and related rights in the internal market” (COM 2004, 261 final), the Consultation of more than eighty organizations launched shortly after, the Commission Study published on July 7, 2005 that proposed a community initiative on the cross-border collective management of rights author, the corresponding Recommendation published on October 21, 2005 and the Public Hearing of April 23, 2010, finally the Commission has just presented a Directive proposal on July 11, 2012.The proposal pursues two complementary objectives: on the one hand, promoting greater transparency and better governance of collective management entities by strengthening their information obligations and the control of their activities by rights holders, in order to create incentives for the provision of more innovative and better quality services; on the other hand, encourage and facilitate the granting of multi-territorial and multi-repertoire licenses of copyrights of musical works for their online use in the territory of the internal market. Although it still has a long way to go institutionally through the Council and Parliament before it is adopted, we must welcome this initiative, which is so relevant for the future of both management entities and multi-territorial licenses for online musical works.
