FAQs

• This
• is 
• a
• Test

Public Performance Licence – ECCO Inc. issues licences on behalf of the copyright owner or their agent, granting the right to perform the work in, or transmit the work to, the public.

Mechanical Licence – ECCO Inc. issues licences on behalf of the copyright owner or their agent, usually to a record company, granting the record company the right to reproduce and distribute a specific composition at an agreed fee per unit manufactured.

Synchronisation Licence – music publishers issue licences as the copyright owner or their agent, usually to a producer, granting the right to synchronise the musical composition in timed relation with audiovisual images on film or videotape.

The cost of an ECCO licence depends on the type of premises being licensed and the extent of music usage. ECCO applies a variety of rates for all types of premises. So, different licence fees will be paid, for example, by restaurants, shops, bars, hotels, guest houses, factories, offices, discos, cinemas, ships, one-off events and many others. The ECCO Tariff is available on this website.

Musicians or other artists whom you may have engaged or permitted to perform do not need an ECCO licence – you do. Musicians do not own the administration rights in their works once they have joined any of the 120 or so CMOs worldwide; they either assign or licence these rights to the CMO. ECCO therefore owns these rights by direct assignments from its members and through reciprocal agreements with other CMOs.

An ECCO licence runs from year to year, unless determined by either party serving the required notice provided for in the licence. ECCO has a licence for every type of music use; licences generally fall into one of the following categories:

• Broadcasting Agreements entered into with radio and television stations and cable operators.
• General Licensing, either in the form of a yearly 'blanket' licence (for hotels, bars, restaurants, etc.) or a per-event licence (such as for concerts and other music events).
  ECCO has recently introduced internet streaming and music download licensing, as well as ringtone licensing.

A licence from ECCO gives you the right to use copyright music in public through a single transaction. This saves you the time and effort that would otherwise be required to contact each individual copyright owner to clear each individual piece of music before use, as required by law.

Under copyright law (enacted in each Eastern Caribbean state), if you wish to use copyright music in public, you must first obtain permission from each copyright owner – an impossible task without ECCO!

Public Performing Right – the exclusive right of the copyright owner, granted by copyright law, to authorise the performance or transmission of the work in public.

Reproduction Right – the exclusive right of the copyright owner, granted by copyright law, to authorise the reproduction of a musical work in a record, cassette or CD.

Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings – SoundExchange, along with record companies, licences these exclusive rights on behalf of copyright owners in a sound recording.

In the Eastern Caribbean, copyright generally lasts for a period of at least 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies.

Note: everything created privately and originally after 1 January 2006 is copyrighted and protected, whether or not it carries a notice (Berne Copyright Convention). Copyright is established the moment a work is fixed in a tangible form.

When you join ECCO, you assign certain rights to the society to administer on your behalf. These include:

• the right to perform the music in public (concerts, pubs, shops, etc.);
• the right to communicate the music to the public (including broadcasting, on-demand broadcasting, and use of music on internet interactive services, as well as satellite and cable transmissions).

ECCO also acts as your agent to administer the following rights:

• the right to copy the music (pressing CDs, downloads);
• the right to issue copies of the work to the public (sale of CDs, tapes or vinyl in shops);
• the right to rent or lend the work to the public (renting videos, tapes, CDs, or library lending).

If you own the copyright, you possess the exclusive right to do, authorise or prohibit the following acts in relation to the work:

• Reproduction (copying) of the work.
• Translation of the work.
• Adaptation, arrangement or other transformation of the work.
• The first public distribution of the original and of each copy of the work by sale, rental or otherwise.
• Rental or public lending of the original or a copy of an audiovisual work, a work embodied in a sound recording, a computer programme, a database, or a musical work in the form of notation, irrespective of who owns the original or copy concerned.
• Importation of copies of the work, even where the imported copies were made with the authorisation of the copyright owner.
• Public display of the original or a copy of the work.
• Public performance of the work.
• Broadcasting of the work.
• Communication to the public (for example, via the internet) of the work.

Registering your music with ECCO or any other CMO does not create copyright. Currently, no official registration system is available in our territories. All original music is protected by copyright from the time it is recorded or written down in some format.

In music, copyright begins automatically as soon as a piece of music is created and documented or recorded (for example, in digital format, on video, tape or CD, or by simply writing down the notation of a score).

Copyright protects original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works. It treats an original work as property that is owned by somebody. It is a form of property right that exists in certain categories of protected works and, in its simplest form, means the right to copy. Under copyright law, permission must be obtained before copyright works can be used. As well as existing in original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, copyright protection also extends to sound recordings, films, broadcasts (including wire and cable transmissions) and typographical arrangements of published editions.

The four societies of the English-speaking Caribbean, COSCAP (Barbados), COTT (Trinidad & Tobago), JACAP (Jamaica) and ECCO (OECS Territories), are founding members of an umbrella organisation called the Association of Caribbean Copyright Societies (ACCS). One of the main purposes of ACCS is to share resources and reduce operating costs. The lead project is the sharing of a database known as WIPO Connect (developed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation), which enables the documentation necessary for accurate administration of authors' rights to be maintained centrally, and for these details to be easily exported to other societies where the ACCS repertoire is used. Conversely, as the region uses a large percentage of the US/European repertoire, the WIPO Connect database is used to import the active catalogues of our sister societies, ensuring accurate and comprehensive distributions.

Collective Management Organisations similar to ECCO exist in most countries worldwide. Under direct reciprocal representation agreements between ECCO and these CMOs, ECCO's members are represented all over the world, including the UK, USA, Spain, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Barbados, Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and others. Consequently, if a musical work by an ECCO member is publicly performed in the USA, for example, one of the US societies will have authority to licence the performance and remit the royalties to ECCO after deducting expenses. In turn, ECCO is responsible for administering the rights in the Eastern Caribbean for international creators.
 

ECCO is known as a Collective Management Organisation (CMO), because its primary role is to administer certain intellectual property rights on behalf of its members in the Eastern Caribbean and, through reciprocal agreements, on behalf of music creators worldwide. ECCO collects fees by issuing licences to music users, granting them permission and authority to carry out the restricted acts defined in the various Copyright Acts of the region, including public performances, broadcasting, communication to the public, and reproduction.

To make royalty payments to its members, ECCO needs to know what music is being used. It uses a digital monitoring system to track what certain audio and audiovisual stations play. For many major live events, ECCO sends agents to obtain firsthand information on the songs performed. Given the vast number of public performances that take place each year in bars, nightclubs, hotels and elsewhere, it is impossible to track every single performance. ECCO therefore distributes general licence revenue against the data supplied by radio stations and a sample of smaller live events.

ECCO also collects royalties from around the world for its members, through reciprocal agreements with overseas CMOs. ECCO is a non-profit-making organisation. After recovering its running costs, it distributes the remaining money collected to the members identified on logs supplied by radio stations and through data gathered from major events.

It would be impossible for individual composers, authors or publishers of music to monitor every use of their works, issue licences and collect royalties from broadcast and public performances across the Eastern Caribbean and the rest of the world. 
The basic role of ECCO is therefore to:

1. grant licences to music users (radio and television stations, restaurants, bars, hotels, DJs, etc.) for the public performance of music in the Eastern Caribbean;
2. collect licence fees; and
3. distribute royalties to its members and to foreign copyright owners whose works ECCO controls through reciprocal agreements.

ECCO administers the “performing rights” in musical works through an assignment of these rights by the original owners (its members, who are also the creators). There are three components in this process: the Creator, the User and ECCO. The Creator holds the original rights in their work and is entitled to compensation for its use. The User needs the Creator's permission for each use – and this is where ECCO steps in. The Creator assigns certain rights to ECCO to administer, and ECCO in turn grants a licence (usually a blanket licence) to the User for use of ECCO's repertoire. The licence fees paid by the User are collected and distributed back to the creator by ECCO in the form of royalties.
 

ECCO's policy and management are determined by a Board of Directors, elected by the general membership. The Board currently comprises 6 writers and 2 publishers from Saint Lucia, along with one director elected from Steering Committees in Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts & Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The current Board has a mandate to transition the organisation to a structure of one Director per member state. The Board delegates the day-to-day running of ECCO to a Chief Executive Officer and other employees.