Collective Management Organisations (“CMOs“) perform a vital role in Singapore’s creative sector by acting as a conduit between content rights owners and content users. CMOs represent thousands of content rights owners in Singapore and provide content users with efficient and cost-effective access to protected content.
Seeking to enhance Singapore’s collective management ecosystem, the Copyright (Collective Management Organisations) Regulations 2023 (“Regulations“), which are made pursuant to Part 9 of the Copyright Act 2021, were gazetted on 31 October 2023. The Regulations set out a new CMO class licensing scheme (“Licensing Scheme“), which will come into operation on 1 May 2024.
The Licensing Scheme seeks to achieve a well-functioning collective management ecosystem by raising standards of transparency, accountability, efficiency and good governance amongst CMOs. It applies a light-touch model of regulation targeted at five critical areas, while leaving CMOs with the flexibility to choose how to best comply with the licence conditions.
In this Update, we consider the key aspects of the forthcoming Licensing Scheme.
For more information, click here to read the full Legal Update.
