Power To The Creators

[Nashville Post by Mark Wheeler] To Tim Smith, confusion is costly — especially when it comes to copyright management in the entertainment sector.

Smith’s MyWerx, which was founded in late 2008, applies aspects of social networking and wiki platforms to allow content creators from the music, video and film worlds to manage the copyright information of their life’s work in real time. MyWerx’s patent-pending technology organizes works by date of creation, location, inspiration, percentage splits and more.

“There are a lot of things in the industry that don’t work for the benefit of the writers. Having an industry that is very transparent in its accounting behooves everyone,” he said.

Smith has enlisted a big-name list of Music Row veterans to help MyWerx grow. Among them are Tim DuBois, who in February was tapped to lead ASCAP’s Nashville office, as well as former echomusic chief Mark Montgomery and Barry Coburn of Ten Ten Music Group.

“Ownership information changes with new deals, splits, deaths, divorces, all on one song or item,” said Smith, who helped run Copyright Management Inc., one of the first copyright administration systems, for much of the 1980s and launched Copyright.net about a decade ago. “So the big problem is, the ownership information is constantly changing. If you had to have an organization full of data-entry clerks keeping up with that information, it would cost an arm and a leg. We leverage the power of community to do the data entry.”

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