Republic of Türkiye

[TR] Music Collecting Societies Sign Agreement with Radio and Television Broadcasters

IRIS 2009-2:1/32

Gül Okutan Nilsson

Intellectual Property Research Center, Istanbul Bilgi University

The four major music collecting societies in Turkey, representing authors (MESAM & MSG), phonogram producers (MU-YAP) and performers (MUYORBIR) joined forces to sign a copyright agreement with the Television Broadcasters Association representing 55 leading TV channels in Turkey, constituting approximately 90 % of the television broadcasting sector.

This historic agreement, which was signed in October 2008 in the presence of the Turkish Minister of Culture, ends a decade-long legal struggle that had existed between the music collecting societies and the broadcasters, ever since the music collecting societies actively started to make efforts to collect copyright fees for broadcast music in Turkey. According to the agreement, the TV channels will pay approximately TRY 20 million (roughly EUR 10 million) for one year into the common account of the collecting societies, to be distributed to their members. The tariffs for the copyright fees are determined according to how many hours of music are used by each channel per day, whether it is a national, regional or local channel and the type of broadcast (terrestrial, satellite, cable or digital).

A similar agreement was signed with the Turkish Radio and Television Broadcasters Collecting Society, which represents 704 regional and local radio and television channels. The radio and television channels that are parties to this agreement will receive access to the digital music archive of the four collecting societies containing approximately 100,000 pieces of music.

These agreements follow a framework agreement that was signed in March 2008 by the same collecting societies with the Federation of Turkish Hotel Enterprises, a legal body which brings together several hotel associations under the same umbrella group. In this agreement, the Federation promised to make sure that a minimum number of hotels with at least 150,000 beds in total would agree to pay the tariff negotiated by the Federation to the common account of the music collecting societies. The tariff for hotels is determined according to the number of rooms, size of other common areas and number of stars awarded to the hotel.

With these agreements, the music collecting societies seem to have arrived at a satisfactory solution to the problem of collecting copyright fees from hotels and broadcasters.