Software for the Collective Management Societies in the Arab Region

The Software is designed to serve different forms of Collective Management Organizations, mainly:

• Independent Societies: exercising entire function of collective management organization, including documentation, licensing and distribution. Examples of such societies that fall under this category are ONDA (Algeria) and OTPDA (Tunisia).

• Affiliated Societies: Working under the umbrella of a larger regional/international organizations (e.g. SACEM) where collective management functionality is performed in communication and liaison among societies in the network. Examples of such organizations are SACEM Lebanon and SACERAU (Egypt). Documentation and licensing/collection are performed by these societies while distribution of royalties is carried out in SACEM headquarters in France.

Objectives & Scope

• The Software's primary purpose is to support Collective Management Societies to authorize, manage and track the economic rights of their members when their copyright works are used in public.

• Works covered by the software include: novels, poems, plays, reference works, newspapers, and computer programs, databases, films, musical compositions, and choreography; and artistic works such as paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, architecture, and advertisement, maps, and technical drawings.
• Related rights belonging to the intermediaries in the production, recording or diffusion of the works of copyright owners (e.g. producers of sound records, radio/TV organizations & film producers) are not covered in version one of the software but might be available in subsequent releases.

• Economic rights administered by the software are the rights of reproduction, broadcasting, public performance, adaptation, translation, public recitation, public display and distribution.

• Moral rights that include the author's right to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of his work that might be prejudicial to his honor or reputation are not administered by the software.

• The Software is customized to the needs of existing and emerging societies in the Arab region and is designed to server their current and future automation requirements.

Basic Functionality

To automate the collective management process, the software provides three core pillars to record and manage the use of works by users and to distribute associated royalties according to such use:

• Documentation: hosts information related to right holders (members) together with their works (repertoire). Information about right holders includes: contact and identity information and membership (registration) information. Information about works includes: title and description; version/sequence; international identification codes (e.g. ISWC or ISBN).

• Licensing: facilitates the authorization of users (such as radio stations, cinemas and restaurants) for the use of works in the Collective Management Organization repertoire based on the payment of equitable remuneration and the observance of certain conditions.

• Royalties' distribution: Provides a ground of distribution of royalties to its members based on their assets (information on members and their works) and information about programs obtained from utilization of works by users.