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INTERPRETATION ON COPY-RIGHT INTERMEDIARY LICENS-ING
Disputes over the issue of whether a copyright holder, after joining a copyright intermediary organization, may then itself license its works to others, or instruct a third party to license its works to others, are on the rise again.
In an interpretation dated 11 July 2006, the In-tellectual Property Office (IPO) noted that Arti-cle 13 Paragraph 2 of the Copyright Intermediary Organization Act provides that within the scope of rights placed under the management of a copyright intermediary organization, a member of such an organization may not itself grant li-censes or instruct a third party to grant licenses on its behalf. Therefore, if the owner of the economic rights in a musical work has joined a copyright intermediary organization and placed the right of public performance of the work un-der the intermediary organization's management, the rights owner may not itself grant a license for such performance, nor may it instruct a third party to grant such a license on its behalf. Fur-thermore, in practice many economic rights owners entrust the management of their rights to a copyright intermediary organization under an exclusive license, so that the terms of the license also bar them from exercising the licensed rights themselves.
If, in violation of the above prohibitions, a rights owner grants a license to another party for use of a work within the scope of rights that are under the management of an intermediary organization, the license so granted is null and void.