France’s Sacem partners with IBM for online royalty system

Sacem, France’s collection society for songwriters and composers, announced a collaboration with IBM to create a new online royalty system. The project is called URights and will be built on the IBM Cloud. It could improve the ability to track online music usage and rights payments, as well as offering data analytics and local customizations.

“We are passionate about ensuring a sustainable creative future by using the latest technology to enhance efficiency in identifying the usage of our members’ works – in any digital media, on any web platform,” Sacem CEO Jean-Noël Tronc said. “URights will enable us to better optimise collections and distributions to our members and for all the repertoires we are mandated to protect, in the most transparent way.”

Tracking use in online audiovisual content seems to be a focus of URights, with YouTube a likely subject. Several individuals and artists’ groups have questioned the tools for copyright and royalty protections on YouTube. Those debates are projected to be a continued hot-button topic through 2017.