What the Heck is Happening With the Copyright Office?
- Eric Doades
- 4 days ago
- 26 min read
Join us today as we talk with Jessica Sobhraj, the co-founder and CEO of Cosynd; a platform that helps creators protect their copyrights. We start by talking about the complex legal maneuvers involving the US Copyright Office; we then head into the ongoing impact of AI and the proactive steps you should take to safeguard your intellectual property.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
Dmitri: [00:00:00] Jessica Sobhraj is the co-founder and CEO of Cosynd one of the leading copyright protection platforms, empowering thousands of creators and IP owners worldwide to protect their work every day. Over 2 billion people engaged with content protected by Cosynd on behalf of clients like Epidemic Sound, USA today, Monarch and Forbes.
Also the Guardian in the Wall Street Journal. Under Jessica's leadership co-sign provides essential copyright related legal documents and facilitates registrations. With the US Copyright Office, with over a decade of experience. She's a respected authority on creator's rights and intellectual property licensing in the music industry.
And she's a passionate advocate for gender equality because she's so dedicated to helping creators register copyrights. I thought she would be the perfect person to update us on what's going on with the copyright office and the political maneuvering around copyrights, music and ai. Hey Jessica, welcome to the podcast.
Jessica: Hey, thanks for having me.
Dmitri: as I think I told you, I'm not an expert on all this stuff, so I have a lot of questions, but you might have to [00:01:00] explain them slowly.
Jessica: Yeah, you got it. I think that this topic is so relevant, so necessary, but also it is so complex and there's lots of moving parts around it, so I love talking to you. First of all, you're one of my favorite people in the industry, and I think we can tackle this just as two friends hanging out, just trying to understand the world.
Dmitri: Awesome. I love that about you, and I really appreciate it. I'm excited to have this conversation. All right, so I'm gonna dive in. What's the latest news with the copyright office and this firing of the director? Sheer Perlmutter.
Jessica: Okay. So there's a lot to unpack here and I'm gonna actually kinda give us a timeline of what's happened and what's unfolding. So the head of the Library of Congress was terminated by the White House and that was a big deal because her position is actually a. Senate confirmed seat that has a term for 10 years.
So out of the gate there's already a big question of whether or non her termination is actually legal. So at the same time, the copyright office releases their preliminary report [00:02:00] on AI and it came out in three parts and there wasn't anything earth shattering in like parts one or two, which really dealt with the issue of.
Deep fakes and how do we address that as a community? and then also, can you or can you not register works that have been created by AI and what that framework might look like? the, I think bombshell. Part of the report was the third part, which essentially said that AI companies that are using content do not have the right to do so under this claim of fair use.
And fair use is just a fancy way of saying Hey, I can use your stuff to do whatever I want and I don't have to pay you because there I'm meeting certain criteria that, does not cause you any harm. And. Those of us that are in the music industry know that, replicating stuff with AI or creating pieces with AI that directly competes with your own content is definitely a problem, and that's really harmful.
So this report drops, and then literally the next day, the registrar of the [00:03:00] Copyright office, JIRA Perlmutter, was terminated by the White House as well too without cause Shera is now challenging that termination in court, and I believe we'll start hearing arguments fairly soon, but as Shera makes her exit, two folks from the DOJ show up at the copyright office with a letter from the Trump administration saying, Hey, we are now the new acting heads and we're in charge.
And because there is this ongoing litigation around, around whether or not,Sherra and Carla's terminations were legal. The copyright office says, Hey, wait a sec. We're not sure about this. And those gentlemen are escorted outta the building by Capitol Police.
Dmitri: Wow.
Jessica: we have about 50 creator organizations that are also challenging the terminations of Jira and Carla and really supporting them.
But while this is playing out on the AI front, we have venture capital that's flooding the market. We have [00:04:00] billionaires calling for the abolishment of copyright. We have over 40 court cases that will determine if AI companies. Even have to pay creators. and a big spending bill that's making its way through the Senate that is super pro AI and prevents states from creating their own regulation regarding ai.
all while content owners are having their own negotiations with individual AI companies. So there is a lot
Dmitri: Wow. that is a lot. And that's super valuable breakdown of kind of the timeline of what's been going on and, and so forth. I want to talk about,the relationship between copyright protection and unlicensed AI training. But before we get there, because you're involved and engaged in this conversation with other copyright experts, I'm curious, what's the talk among those copyright experts?
Is this Trump. Simply trying to put leadership that he can control in the Library of Congress and in the copyright office like he's doing with all these other agencies? Or is he specifically trying to undermine copyright protection for the benefit of the tech companies [00:05:00] you referred to? or maybe this is just a confusing divide tactic where he's negotiating all his own business deals on the side and we're all just left trying to figure out what's going on.
what's what are copyright experts saying?
Jessica: Yeah, I, so I don't think you're wrong on any of those counts. I think
Dmitri: It's all of the above.
Jessica: yeah, all of the above. Where's the option for that? I think all of those things are happening and certainly, flood the zone is a tactic that we have seen, this administration do. We've seen in, you know, the, the last six months really, and it is.
it is head spinning for sure. and so, you know, I would say obviously these opinions are my own and not necessarily representative of any company or, organization that I'm affiliated with. But I think that we are all having very different conversations. You have the legal community having the conversation around, is this fair use?
What happens if the courts decide that? AI training is fair use and suddenly no AI company has to pay any creator. Then you have, leaders in the music industry who are having a conversation [00:06:00] around active negotiation and also a potential framework for how AI can license, our content. An important part of that report that we didn't touch on is that the copyright office did not determine that there is a need for new infrastructure when it comes to licensing for ai.
And I think that's something that the community is really going to have to address because, sitting in this seat, I hear a lot of conversations around, maybe we should set up, a rate court system that's very similar to, to, other royalty types that. AI can use to engage with us, set a fair standard.
Then you have the major labels who are engaging directly with AI to have their own, their own negotiations and own rates set, which inevitably will set the precedent for every other content owner. and then even looking outside of the music industry, like we, you talked about it, we represent a lot of news publishers like, WSJ, the Guardian. [00:07:00] Forbes, et cetera. they're also all having their own conversations and we're seeing the news vertical, you know, have a lot of success in getting, licensing agreements in place with AI to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. So I think, we're all thinking about this in different aspects.
The tech community is. 'cause we're tac we're automatically thinking about how do we present solutions for a lot of these things. is there a mechanism that we can slip in that will deal with attribution? And you're seeing a lot of companies around AI attribution and like revealing what's been used to train.
and then you have a lot of legislative efforts that are all about disclosure that I don't think are getting enough attention and enough light of day. so those efforts are really about. Using legislation to ensure or demand, rather, that AI companies have to disclose the works they used to train their AI with.
And if you've got that disclosure list, the next natural conversation is great. [00:08:00] Now we have a list of people that have to be compensated and we can, have those conversations from there. So these things are all running.
Dmitri: Parallel.
Jessica: the same time. But I think that the biggest, like the biggest mover of the needle is going to be some of these court cases shaking out.
Dmitri: I am trying to understand that. That's great. And man, I just keep getting, I don't know, sur surprised, engaged. I don't know what it is. flustered by the complexity. yeah. By the complexity of all these things that are happening in parallel. At the same time, I'm trying to understand. Is copyright protection getting undermined through this process around who has control of the copyright office and if it is getting undermined, is the conversation of unlicensed AI training a moot point?
I guess it's, it's operating on both fronts. It's does copyright get to stand? Or maybe copyright does get to stand, but this is considered fair use. But if copyright does not stand,if basically,the [00:09:00] government is eroding the concept of copyright is, does it even make sense to, to focus on unlicensed AI training?
Because at that point, what are you protecting?
Jessica: Yeah, such a good question. 'cause it really does hit on exactly what we've been talking about in terms of flood the zone and it hits on like where do we point our attention to? How do we prioritize all of these things? All of these fires happening all at once. When you've got A teeny tiny engine.
Right? And you decide like, where are you going? so let's take it back a step and talk about the importance of the copyright office. The copyright office really is our first line of defense when it comes to protecting creators. Why is that? Well, the courts take their guidance from the copyright office.
They, certainly look to them when it comes to subject matter expertise when it comes to figuring out. Hey, is AI training very used or not? In what context? And as part of their function, the copyright office will provide expert guidance and [00:10:00] kind of go through the test and give their opinions so that the courts can rule however they're going to rule.
And so the other function of the Copyright office, which is like the main thing is they register and protect all of your interests. You cannot file a lawsuit or an infringement lawsuit unless you've registered with the copyright office. If you're based here in the us, if you're not based in the us, you can still file your lawsuit, but you're not entitled to statutory damages.
You actually have to prove actual damages like what you suffered. So here's how that works out in math. If you have registered your copyright before an infringement has happened. You're entitled to statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement, plus your attorney's fees. So we have clients who had their works infringed by, bad actors.
And it might be like, 12 things, for example, or like. Less than 10 things, but because those things have been infringed so many [00:11:00] times by the same bad actor, they're able to actually go and claim statutory damages of millions of dollars because they registered ahead of time when you don't register ahead of time.
Or if you're based outside the US and you're looking for actual, you've literally got approved. Like how did, like how much did you suffer? You know, what is the dollar amount we should assign to it? So the biggest challenge for AI is when creators register their works, because if these court cases shake out that they do have to pay, that they did infringe the work.
So you're talking about AI having to pay these creators $150,000 times every single time that their work was used to create some sort of like generative work, right? So it adds up significantly. I think that is the, the important part and the, part that I think people glaze over is the copyright off of office by way of registration, enables us to get monetary justice.
It enables all of these class actions, it enables all of these [00:12:00] lawsuits and, you know, all the amazing work that NMPA for example, does on behalf of their members. The registration is a key part of that, If there is a copyright office that is pro ai and we know the White House is very pro AI because it's, it's a major part of their agenda.
obviously we have a lot of,AI tech companies that are very, deeply ingrained there at the White House and with the administration. If suddenly now we have a pro AI copyright office there, there isn't anything that can be done to undermine copyright law itself without an act of Congress.
So that is the first step. But at the copyright office, there are certainly some procedural and policy things. That can be done to make life harder for us on the creative end, or, make it harder to register. And like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna dive into what those things are 'cause I don't wanna give people ideas, right? I don't wanna be like, here's your blueprint for how to screw everybody over. but I think that's an [00:13:00] important distinction. For us as a community to really understand the implications and to really respect and appreciate the work that the Copyright Office is doing right now as our first line of defense.
Dmitri: Okay, cool. So that's super helpful. so let's say there's no ultimately no legislative shift around copyright protection as a concept. How do you see the so-called fair use claims versus. The suits against companies with unlicensed training data playing out. And then I'm also curious, how actually proactive licensing music or negotiations around that would play out.
But I'm just curious just to, again, since you're more of an expert in this than I am,what do you think is likely to play out here?
Jessica: Ooh, that's a tough question. I wish I had like my, my crystal
Dmitri: Yeah, it's a bit of a, it's.
Jessica: here's how it's all gonna play out. so here's what I think, I think that when it comes to things that are, Clear cut, fair use. It's like [00:14:00] purely educational. It's not competing with the market.
It passes all of those tests. I think courts will probably rule that, hey, like it's not, it is fair use rather. so I think that's, a small group probably of these court cases. I think that. The fact that the third part of the AI report explicitly said, Hey, we believe that, AI training, especially AI training with the intention that the output will compete with the works that were used to train the ai.
That is not fair use. I think that is a, a strong indicator and a strong, thing to, for the courts to ignore. I think that. In the cases where we're certainly seeing some active negotiation happen, that's a really strong indicator that the AI companies believe that they probably won't win those fair use, AI suits. So it really does come down to a case by case basis. And, the extent, to which that [00:15:00] specific AI company used the works. Did they use a piece of it? Did they use all of it? What was the intention behind it? I think that we're there, like we, it's certainly not a secret, right?
Like we know that there are ai, AI companies that are out there trying to build, sync libraries made entirely of AI content to displace the sync industry. In fact, I think, I think the latest report that. I read either yesterday or over the weekend. one of the major AI CEOs was saying that he believes that AI could displace entry level workers by up to 50%, meaning we'll have like massive.
Unemployment because of this. And I think us in the music industry really need to pay attention to that because entry level is such a key key. It's like right of passage, right? This is like how we come up in the music industry and a lot of those functions have a risk of being displaced by ai. I think we're gonna see displacement in streaming and we're already starting to see that.
I dunno if you saw the, um, the [00:16:00] geezer report that came out just before Music Biz Geezer at that time. This was, May, 2025. geezer's report said that, nearly 20% of all new works that it was receiving were created by ai, and 70% of that was for fraudulent use. So. Our industry, I think, is one of the more attractive ones for AI to target.
but it's also one of the most vulnerable ones because, our right situations aren't super, you know, clear cut. Unlike the news vertical where there's one clear owner right here in the music industry. We have multiple owners. And it's really, this is really our time. I keep calling it like our Napster moment, but this is our time to come together as a community on the recorded side and on the music publishing side to really work together to resolve this issue and, and get ahead of it.
Dmitri: This is so interesting, Jessica. I, I think I need to gather my thoughts. We also need to take a break, so when we come [00:17:00] back,we'll continue this conversation. Once I process everything you've just told me, we'll be right back.
Okay. We're back Jessica. And I wanted to ask you, you mentioned kind of like the disruption of entry-level jobs in society as a whole, as a result of ai. I'm curious what you think, would be the answer to what's at stake if AI disrupts the music industry specifically, what are, what are the threats there?
Jessica: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And we touched on it briefly earlier, talking about, entire libraries that are made of AI generated content specifically for sync, but also like, you know, all of the companies that are providing music for the background noise and music for bars, for department stores, for all of those things, even at like a, Taking it outside of like content itself, but looking at data and analytics. All of those roles can get displaced by ai and I think are getting displaced by AI right now. Um, hopping back into creative, the, I don't know if you heard about this or saw it, but we had the first completely [00:18:00] AI generated advertisement, um, that has been released out into the world,
Dmitri: I saw that.
Jessica: Everything in it,
Dmitri: It's insane.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, video creation, marketing specifically, fan engagement, all of those tools that we currently use, I think those all can become ai, AI functions. let's see what else
Dmitri: Yeah,I think part of the point here is, you know, we can talk about like. Is it fair use or not? oh, well this is new content. It's derivative. But then the flip side of the question is, what? What is the economic impact of a handful of technology companies owning more and more of the rights behind the new creative stuff, and how does that impact the human creators who created the original content or who would create the future original content than other people that other people are monetizing on the backend?
I think that's sort of what you're getting at here, is that it's not only. what are the possibilities of creation, but also how do you continue like a [00:19:00] diverse marketplace where you have a lot of creative people contributing to music and video and film and ads and marketing and all, all this stuff.
There's that. There's the other side. It's I guess I'm seeing your point there is. Is, that's the other side of the balance sheet around what happens when creators aren't attributed and aren't able to make a living off the stuff they're creating.
Jessica: Yeah, exactly. Even just taking it in the context of royalties, for example, right? So if you've got works that are entirely created by ai, who really owns that? And then also if no one actually owns it, there's no human creator behind it who like. Who do you pay a royalty to? Now you've appended the entire royalty community as well, the pros, the publishers, et cetera.
And then the flip side of that is if you're, if you are a, a company that is using content, you're a big platform. You're even a brand, whatever it is. A major driver for you to pay creators fairly is the threat and fear that you [00:20:00] will be sued for infringement. And so when the copyright office says, Hey, if your work is entirely made by ai, you can't register here.
That means that you, as someone who is creating ai, AI works entirely. You have no recourse. So any platform can use your stuff freely and do whatever they want with it because you. You have no right to file a lawsuit and what are you even filing over? 'cause no human actually created this. So it's a dangerous pit that I think we're moving towards.
Dmitri: I wanna talk a little bit about what the ideal scenario would be for these both tech companies, platforms, and any a ai, anyone that's using AI training. But before we get to that, I do want to ask, what should, now that you've painted this picture of where things could possibly go, what should artists and songwriters and publishers be doing now in response to what's happening, with this potentially unlicensed AI training and so forth?
Jessica: Yeah, it is so hard to stay focused as a creator right now because you're getting thrown like six different initiatives that everyone wants you to [00:21:00] engage in, and it's really frustrating. at minimum what you should be doing right now is getting in touch with your local trade association, whether that be, a two I-M-N-M-P-A-A-I-M-P, whatever it may be.
Get in touch, start opening those emails. Start reading the newsletters, start attending the sessions, because there are major shifts in things happening that you need to be participating in. I think a lot of people think that whenever a trade association or organization makes a big move, that it will trickle down to them and benefit them.
And a lot of the times, especially with like infringement, lawsuits, those creators that have registered their works that are participating in that lawsuit, they receive the direct benefit, right? So it really is upon you to, one, make sure that your work is protected so that you can participate in a monetary way in this conversation.
And even if you can't afford to register, just get engaged with your local. trade body, [00:22:00] right? You wanna be aware of the issues, you wanna get ahead of things and you wanna have a voice in this conversation because, and I think you and I are old enough to remember like. We remember how all of the Napster and streaming conversations went down.
We know this really took a gigantic community effort. And even at the end of it, I don't think many folks were that happy. and so this is that moment all over again, and we're seeing other verticals have success in banning together, and this is the time that the music industry, all participants need to do the same thing and just have a voice in that conversation.
Dmitri: So register your works and get involved with trade groups and be part of the effort to, yeah.
Jessica: And also, call your senator, call your local Congress person and say, Hey, I'm really freaked out about the idea that like we have a very pro, AI White House and we may have a pro ai. Every other body. And as a creator, this is a direct threat to my work and I wanna make sure that we are attacking, attacking this responsibly and that [00:23:00] we have some framework for doing that.
But it all really begins with ensuring that the government and our, our legislative representatives understand the importance. And value of copyright and the work that we bring to the table. so there's this great app called Five Calls that you can use to kind of figure out who is your local rep, who is your local senator, and just ring them, send emails.
but again, I know like there's so many things that you could be calling your senator about right now. Um, but if you're a creator that this should be one of them.
Dmitri: God, it's called five calls.
Jessica: Yeah.
Dmitri: Yeah. Got it. Okay. okay. I do wanna find out more about cosign and how this plays into it, but I want to ask one more question that's the other side of this. We just talked about creators and their part in this, but maybe there's some tech companies, out there and some AI platforms that want to do this correctly too.
Or maybe there's at least a vision. That you want to set forward that we're advocating for? What would you like to see tech companies to be implementing to address all the concerns we just talked about with AI [00:24:00] training and the use of, music and rights there.
Jessica: do you have another 50 minutes to go through it all? okay. So look, let's tackle this in two ways. Let's talk about, what investor sentiment is right now. I think it's pretty clear on the investor community that I. VCs and Angels and everybody knows that they likely are going to have to pay for content that the AI companies they've invested in, have used.
And so I, I have heard musings and rumblings just out on the street of investors saying, we know we're probably gonna have to pay micro pennies on micro pennies, right? So I'm gonna throw that out there and say, look, there is sentiment that we know we have to pay. But I think that the amount.
these companies are willing to pay is largely out of line with what we would like to see. So that's one side of it. The other side of it is I think that tech companies and ethical AI are taking the right approach here, building things out, like surreal, for example. Love those guys that are all about [00:25:00] being able to opt in and opt out your content from AI training and being able to, use technology to attribute where you know, where your work has been used.
I think the attribution angle is so smart. I think that the opt-in opt-out angle is so smart. I think that platforms like Dzer that are taking an active hand in scanning the works, that they're ingesting to figure out what's been used, been created with AI and what hasn't been. I think that is such a forward step that more platforms should be doing and more communities should be doing.
I think that the biggest thing that we can do right now is to get ahead of all of it, right? Is to really make a big push on the importance of disclosure lists, and whether that's through a legislative effort or whether that's through these companies in ethical ai. Getting the list upfront of what's already been used is going to resolve.
Of so much of the headache here because we're not gonna have to rely on, feeling around in the dark [00:26:00] to, to try to surface works that have been used if you've already got a very clean, clear list. and that if there's some requirements around that. So ensuring that AI companies, for example, have to publish that list within 30 days of training their AI and keep it up to date.
That is the biggest thing that we can lobby for as a community because it resolves so many issues out the gate. And then using. Attribution and using, opt-in opt-outs as our, our secondary line of defense, right? So if I had to paint a picture, I would say, copyright office, copyright registration, first line of defense here, because of all of the guidance they provide to the courts and obviously all of the monetary and legal recourse benefits they provide.
Second line of defense disclosure lists us lobbying for that as a community. Third line of defense attribution, opt-in, opt out. And I, you know, I say this, understanding that, some have called for a, like a rate court system or some official framework for licensing of [00:27:00] ai. Understand that takes a decade to really implement and build and have mandated by legislation.
So we've gotta kind of put together these lines of defenses now and not wait the 10 years, which is probably why the White House's big. Quote, unquote, I'm using air quotes, you can't see it. Um, the quote unquote, uh, big, beautiful spending Bill puts a, a hold on, on states implementing their own AI policies for 10 years because it will take a decade, maybe, hopefully not, but maybe to really add some infrastructure here.
Dmitri: Yeah, that makes sense. To get some pieces in place so that when we start to untangle the knots, there's already kind of a paper trail or breadcrumb trail of what music was used for training and how it shows up. And actually, I have a question about that. So with attribution.
you have to do it on the front end and on the back end of the use of generative ai right on the front end. it's not, it's, what music has been used to train the model and on the back end is what [00:28:00] percentage of any given song was used? in the making of that specific song so that you can assign some sort of, proportional value to the output as well.
It feels like those are two separate pieces of technology, as well. and so I'm just curious,or maybe they have to be intertwined. I'm not really sure. but it'll be interesting to see what people come up with there. And then as you mentioned earlier in the conversation too, there's also kind of like
The terms of the end user. So you've got the AI company, you've got the record label, the artist, the publisher for the training side and for the attribution on the output at the end. But then the user also is like going into a website, text prompting some new song that maybe ends up sounding just like a famous pop artist that developed a whole sound or whatever.
Do they even own any of it? Can they monetize any of it? And then how does, how does that get split between the end user, the AI company, and the, you know, the labels and the publishers and the artists and all that kind of stuff too. So there's like this third, I think this third layer, which is around the terms and service for the user [00:29:00] as well.
Wow. Okay. My brain is full. But I'm thinking about a lot of things. How do you and co-sign play into all of this? I gave a little bit about cosign at the intro, but let's talk about what this actually means for Cosynd. I.
Jessica: Yeah, so Cosin really fits in on that registration layer. So we find that especially catalog owners, on the label side, on the publisher side, the act of registering their works has been so tedious for them. And it often becomes something that an intern has to do, and an intern kind of revolves in and out as the, months to buy over the summer.
So that, that kind of ends up on the pile of stuff that never gets done. And so what we do is just. Simplify the entire process. There's no thinking about what application type you should be using. There's no thinking about how do you register these things in bulk and adhere to all of the rules of the copyright office, unlike, you know, doing your registration with a PO.
It's a little bit more complex in terms of the homework of figuring out like what category do you fall into and if you've got [00:30:00] 10 works that are unpublished, you should be using this application. Versus if you have an entire album with one common author, you should be using this application. So we really take all the guesswork out of it for you and then make sure that your works are registered, so that you can.
Take action when you need to. You can opt into things that NMPA or A two M or whomever are doing, or, you can send out your own independent, threats to so brands that are using your work. So we essentially just make it really easy for you to protect yourself and have the documentation behind you to do that.
Dmitri: Wow. J Jessica, I'm curious, what made you mean you, Jessica launched this company Cosign. How did you get from where you were to this?
Jessica: Yeah, so it all started in a bar in a dark and stormy night. If you really wanna know, as all good stories do, um, no. So I had a previous life, in sync licensing. For like a decade, and I was probably working on like this deal and for the million times this happened to me, but [00:31:00] we're going to sign the papers, like the temp track's in.
It's all good. Client loves the track. Now we're going to sign papers and I need to provide the information for the queue sheet. So I go back to the back office and I'm like, Hey, I need the writer pup information and the label info, and I need it like yesterday because I'm looking through her stuff and I don't see it. And back office would say to me, yeah, sorry, Jess. we actually we're not sure because this contract that we have from them is like super old. It's 30 years old, there's coffee stains all over it. We can't,we just don't know. and so I have to go back to the client now and say, Hey, wait a second.
Turns out that this piece of music that we said was like free and clear and good to go. Oopsies, there's an issue with it. And so it triggered this conversation with. a lot of members from the Women in Music community 'cause that's where I was president for, a handful of years.
And we like to say Women in Music is like an unofficial co-founder here at the company. And it's such a powerful community for just like [00:32:00] getting, questions answered and finding resources and finding comradery and. it's good. It's probably my favorite organization of all.
I'm very sorry for all the organizations I'm also on the board of and ad boards of love you guys. But Wim is my OG number one. And, uh, I had this conversation with maybe close to 150, 200 individual artists, the whim group, about Hey, how do you document. The ownership of the things that you create.
What are, what are you using? And they would all say, oh, we're just using Excel spreadsheets. Or I'm not doing this. I'm just sending out emails and asking everybody. You good. Like you good with the split? Cool. And so I kind of said probably the cheesiest words that every entrepreneur says, which is there has to be a better way.
And started pulling in my friends and like advisors to say, look, our industry has this problem of not being able to document who owns their content. In an affordable way. 'cause they don't wanna have to pay an attorney for every single [00:33:00] thing that they do. So we created a very basic split sheet application that would let you document ownership of everything you created on the same spreadsheet.
You can continuously add works to it and it just changes the date for each new table of here's your ownership split. And then we ended up building in other types of agreements. So like producer agreements, work for hires, collaboration agreements. Ironically, the copyright registration piece came in like years later and it just happened on a whim because we had an advisor say to us, Hey, I'm running this distribution company.
We used to have a product that did this, but like they got bought by somebody else and now we have nothing. Can you guys take a stab at doing it? And we're like, sure, we have a free summer. Why not? Fast forward it. Has become the biggest driver of our business. And a lot of people thought that we knew ahead of time that the Supreme Court was going to rule that you have to register your copyrights before you can file a lawsuit.
We [00:34:00] had no clue. Like we had no idea that was gonna happen. Um, but it was just right time, right place. And we've been out here really just like delivering the gospel and letting everybody know Hey, this is an important development. You should be doing it. whether you are an independent artist or a catalog owner in most cases, it's a requirement if you're selling your catalog or, looking to, uh, to offload.
and that's what we're doing. We're constantly just trying to build out new tools and features to make the entire process easier. Mm-hmm.
Dmitri: Amazing. That's cosign, C-O-S-Y-N D.com. and love the shout out for women in music. I agree. it's a magical organization. I've gone to some events, I've seen some of the work the group has done, and it just has a special energy and spirit to it is very welcoming by the way. And um, and I agree the net, the network is magical.
And it's so cool that you think of them as a co-founder in a sense, as sort of invisible co-founder. Of Cosynd really cool to see you develop your, your company out of that network as well. Okay. This has been [00:35:00] amazing. We've talked about so many things. I just want to, one thing we like to do sometimes is, is, kind of build the network even further.
You mentioned this company's surreal. What other companies and founders do you think are out there helping, to say, protect the existential threats we've discussed on today's episode? Or just, adding something positive to the industry? Do you have any, anyone else, any other companies or founders you wanna shout out before we wrap up?
Jessica: I think there's so many and there it's, it's like constantly evolving. Every day I am reading about a new company that's popping up in the AI space, either specific to our vertical in the music industry or some of the others that we operate in. there's one that's specific to novel. And books, one that's specific speci to, uh, news and literature.
I think that of the ones that I've seen more recently in the music industry, surreal, seems to be a magnet that attracts all of them. 'cause like I'll see one pop up and then all of a sudden they, like, surreal is like on their advisory board or vice versa. So it's all very connected. but yeah, that, that's, I think that is.
That is the one that I think everyone should have their eye on. and the founders are great folks [00:36:00] and they're very engaged and very open to, being a part of this conversation in a very meaningful way.
Dmitri: Yeah. Awesome. Jessica, this has been great. Jessica Sobhraj with Cosynd so great to have you on and thank you so much for taking the time.
Jessica: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Let us know what you think! Tweet @MusicTectonics, find us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
