The Mogol v. Battisti Copyright Case

LORENZO ATTOLICO Nctm Studio Legale

A EU perspective upon who are the winners and who are the losers in the never-ending word-wide battle between authors, music publishers and performing rights organizations.

PREMISE

In an age when, in the United States of America, the music copyright legal landscape is being challenged by multiple pressures and proposals for reform, with top-hits artists fighting now more then ever against their publishers and record labels,¹ against the two major royalty-collecting performing rights organizations (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI)),² and also against the main providers of streaming services³ in order to somehow try to claim more control over their music, we find it extremely proper, timely, and significant to report a recent landmark case that comes from across the Atlantic and specifically from Italy. This case indeed cuts deep into the matter and highlights the "Old Europe’s" approach in trying to resolve a set of very important issues whose legal (and commercial) significance is not limited to either the EU or the U.S. territories, instead being of worldwide scope, inasmuch as it actually derives from the state of the digitalized music industry and market of these times.