On 18th September 2019, partner Chew Phye Keat spoke at the 2-day conference entitled “Conference on the Collective Management of Copyright and Related Rights in South East Asia”, which was organised and funded by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) under a project known as “IP Key South-East Asia”.
The focus of discussion was collective rights management organisations (called “CMO”), namely, organisations formed by copyright owners to become licensing bodies that are permitted to collect royalties for the public performance of their works.
Delegates from ASEAN were present to learn from speakers from Europe and Asia Pacific – which included academics, officers from regulatory bodies and representatives from organisations involved in intellectual property and the phonographic/music industry. These speakers were experts brought in by EUIPO IP Key SEA to give awareness to IP offices in ASEAN on how to have good CMO practices. A CMO normally needs to be approved by the national regulator (such as our Malaysian IP Office) in order to be a licensing body.
Chew Phye Keat, the only legal practitioner among the speakers, in his talk entitled “State of Play of Collective Rights Management (CRM) in Malaysia – Industry Perspective”, spoke on the Malaysian experience and the challenges for CMOs in Malaysia.
