President Donald Trump signed a music copyright bill into law that will streamline royalty payments to artists from digital streamers like Spotify, among other changes to digital copyright law.
The Hatch-Goodlatte Music Modernization Act (H.R. 1551) creates a new collective to offer blanket rights to digital downloads, ending the need to secure rights from individual copyright holders. It also creates new federal protection for sound recordings made before 1972 and used by digital radio, which were previously governed by a patchwork of state laws.
The law creates legal certainty for streamers facing chronic copyright lawsuits and cements new ...