What is ECCO and what is its basic role?
ECCO is known as a collective management organization ‘CMO’ because its primary role is to administer copyright and related rights on behalf of its members in the Eastern Caribbean and through reciprocal agreements, these rights on behalf of creators throughout the world. ECCO collects fees by issuing licences to music users granting them permission and authority to the restrictive acts as defined in the Copyright Acts of the region, inclusing; public performances, broadcasting, communication to the public, reproduction etc. In order to make royalty payments to its members, ECCO needs to know what music is being used. Major users, such as radio stations provide ECCO with detailed reports of the music they play. For many other performances such as St. Lucia Jazz, Carnivals and other festivals across the regions etc. ECCO sends its agents to obtain information first hand on the songs performed. Due to the huge number of public performances that take place every year in bars, nightclubs hotels etc, it is impossible to track every performance that occurs therefore ECCO distributes General Licence revenue against the data supplied by the radio stations.
ECCO also collects royalties from around the world for its members through reciprocal agreements with other CMO’s overseas.
ECCO is a non-profit making organisation. Having recovered its running costs it pays the remaining money collected to the members identified on logs supplied by the radio stations and data collected from major events.
How is ECCO Run?
ECCO policy and management are determined by a Board of Directors, elected by the general membership, which comprises of: - 6 writers & 2 publishers from St. Lucia, one Director elected from Steering Committees in Antigua, Dominica, Grenada & St. Vincent & the Grenadines. The current Board of Directors has a mandate to transform the organization to a position of one Director only from each Member State. The Board delegates the day to day running of ECCO to a General Manager and other employees.
What service does ECCO perform for Members?
It would be impossible for individual composers, authors or publishers of music to monitor the use of their works, issue licences and collect royalties from broadcast and from public performances of their music across the Eastern Caribbean and the rest of the world. Therefore the basic role of ECCO is to: (a) grant licences to music users (radio and television stations, restaurants, bars, hotels, DJ's, etc.) for the public performance of music in the Eastern Caribbean; (b) collect licence fees or royalties; and (c) distribute royalties to its members and foreign copyright owners whose works ECCO also control through reciprocal agreements.
ECCO administers the ‘performing right’ 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 the administration of these rights by ECCO: the Creator, the User and ECCO. The CREATOR holds the original rights in his creation and is entitled to be compensated for the use of his creation. The USER of the creator's property needs the permission of the creator for each use. This is where ECCO comes in. The CREATOR assigns certain rights to ECCO to administer and ECCO in turn grants a licence to the USER (usually a blanket licence) 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.
Related Rights
Related rights also known as “neighboring rights” are the rights that belong to the performers, the producers or phonograms and broadcasting organizations in relation to their performances, phonograms and broadcasts respectively.
Can ECCO protect our music overseas?
Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) similar to ECCO exist in most countries of the world. Under direct reciprocal representation agreements between ECCO and these CMOs’, the Members of ECCO are represented all over the world including; the UK, USA, Spain, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Portugal, Barbados, Cuba, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago and many more. Consequently if, for example, musical works of an ECCO member are publiclly performed in the USA, one of the three USA societies will remit the royalties to ECCO. In turn ECCO is responsible for administering the rights in the Eastern Caribbean for international creators.
What about Regional Co-operation?
The four societies of the English speaking Caribbean, COSCAP (Barbados), COTT (Trinidad & Tobago), JACAP (Jamaica) and ECCO (Eastern Caribbean) are joined together in an umbrella organization called the Caribbean Copyright Link (CCL). One of the main purposes of CCL is to share resources and to cut down on operating costs. The lead project is the sharing of a database known as SGS (developed by the Spanish society SGAE), which enables the documentation necessary for accurate administration of authors rights by the four societies to be maintained centrally and for these details to be easily ‘exported' to other Societies where the CCL repertoire is used. Conversely, as the region uses a large percentage of the US/European repertoire, the SGS database is used to ‘import' the ‘active' catalogue of our sister Societies so that accurate and full distributions can be made.