Interview: Dominic McGonigal on reforming collecting societies

16 January 2012

Emma Barraclough, London

Dominic McGonigal is head of government relations at PPL, a UK collecting society that licenses recorded music on behalf of performers and record companies. He talks to Emma Barraclough about codes of conducts, plans for a digital copyright exchange and what he fears most about the Commission’s reform proposals

Last month the UK government said it will consult over introducing voluntary codes of conduct for collecting societies, following a proposal made by the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property . What’s your view? null

We’re all for a code of conduct. We’ve just launched one for PPL licences. It encapsulates good practice. We already have an internal complaints procedure augmented by an independent procedure. Blackstone Chambers reviews complaints. They already do a lot of work in the sports field, arbitrating disputes in Formula One and in cricket for example. They receive details of complaints to PPL and make a decision. That system is already running but now we’ve wrapped it up in a code that we launched on January 1 2012.

Is the decision to launch a code due to complaints from licensees?

A few people had mentioned it, but it was really more a case of including...

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