Right holders should be permitted to grant ASCAP and BMI rights other than those of public performances. The right holders will be allowed to confer the administration of their repertoires to the same Collecting Society for both performing and mechanical rights, and consequently the Collecting Society will be able to provide users with a “one-stop shop”, thus facilitating their job.
Members should be allowed to partial assignments of their rights and waive their works from the Collective Society in order to directly license certain digital uses. This will meet the needs of publishers for a more flexible collective administration in the field of digital uses and, at the same time, will not prevent them to benefit from the advantages of the collective administration.
The rate-setting process should be submitted to a private arbitration rather than to the judicial Court. This will speed up the rate-setting process, in the interest of all subjects involved, and unburden it with the costs of the judicial litigations.
ASCAP and BMI should be allowed to refuse issuing a license in certain circumstances. Applicants should be required to pay an interim fee during the licensing process. Applicants (and licensees) should be obliged to provide Collective Societies with all the information and documentation needed to establish fees.
It should be established the presumption that a license voluntary negotiated by the parties involved (right holders/collecting Societies and users) gives evidence of the reasonableness of the fee agreed. As a matter of fact, after the wills of the two involved parties have met, giving as a result the finding of a shared fee for the use indicated in the license, such fee should be considered as being reasonable for both parties.