Chapter 5 of the Copyright Review Committee‘s Consultation Paper briefly considers the position of collecting societies (update: you can download a pdf of the Paper here (via DJEI) or here (from this site)). Where rights-holders have established such societies to grant licences in copyrighted works and collect copyright royalties for distribution back to the rights-holders, they give effect to rights-holders’ rights in a very important practical way, and therefore constitute an important means by which rights-holders manage their copyrights and are rewarded for their investments and innovation.

The Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (also here) provides for licensing schemes and the registration of collecting societies, but this is an bewilderingly byzantine area in practice, and in chapter 3 of the Paper, the Committee raised the question of whether many of those issues could be resolved by means of a body like the Copyright Council sketched in that chapter.

If a Council is not established, this chapter asks if there are any other practical mechanisms which might resolve those issues. It also asks if there are any issues relating to copyright licensing and collecting societies which were not addressed in earlier chapters but which can be resolved by amendments to the Act of 2000.

As always, the chapter ends with a series of questions which seem to the Committee to arise from the discussion of the Council, and it is hoped that the next round of submissions will engage some of these questions (there are 86 questions in total, set out in Appendix 3, and the Committee would be delighted to receive any responses to any of them. In particular, it is not necessary for any submission to seek to answer all of them). Any submissions should be received by close of business on Friday 13 April 2012 Thursday 31 May 2012. To make a submission, you can

• email the Review,
• write to Copyright Review, Room 517, Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Kildare Street, Dublin 2,
• complete the Committee’s online questionnaire, or
• use any of the other online submission mechanisms being made available by many interested parties.

There will also be a public meeting from 10:00am until 12:00 noon, on Saturday 24 March 2012, in the Robert Emmet Lecture Theatre, Room 2037 Arts Block (map here), Trinity College Dublin. Attendance is free and open to anyone interested in the work of the Committee, but registration is necessary. To register, you can

• email or write to the Review, as above, or
• complete the Committee’s online questionnaire.