Category Archives: Landmarks

FastTrack Landmarks

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Background

Since the beginning of the modern international copyright (or “authors rights” ) era a century ago, authorship and ownership information for musical works has been maintained in paper filing systems, and exchanged among the world’s copyright management organizations (CMOs) in standardized paper data files, or “Fiches Internationales”, as they were called. These exchanges were necessary to assure the accurate payment of royalties to authors and owners across borders. The rapid expansion of musical repertoire across territories, and the explosive growth of digital delivery mechanisms clearly required a digital solution of global scope. FastTrack was born from that need.

At first, the music industry explored the possibility of a single global repository for music copyright information, but with the computing infrastructure of the time, it proved enormously expensive and much more difficult to establish than first envisioned. The Internet had just been born, and gave CMOs a new path to achieving the same goal… a web-mediated interconnected system of databases housed in member CMOs’ own organizations, close to the authors and copyright owners they represented, and possessing the most authoritative information on works. This vision became FastTrack.

 

Landmarks

2016

Delivery of CIS-Net 5, including the Single Work Dashboard

Michael O’Neill, elected Chair of the Board of Directors

2015

Delivery of “ISWC Resolution Service”

Christophe Waignier, new FastTrack President

Hein van der Ree and Eric Baptiste re-elected Chair and Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors

2014

33,6 Million single works in CIS-Net

New Era, New Strategy

June 2014: UBC (Brazil) new Shareholder

2013

78 societies contribute to CIS-Net and 121 societies use CIS-Net in their daily operations

July 2013: Michel Allain named FastTrack Director General, replacing Chris van Houten (retired)

GRD: FastTrack and ICE collaborate in developments of the GRD (see information on GRD on web site for details)

June 2013, Washington: Buma / Stemra’s Hein van der Ree is elected Chair of the Board of Directors, SOCAN’s Eric Baptiste as Vice-Chair for  2-year term

2012

Global Repertoire Database (GRD): FastTrack is one of the three service providers in addition to Deloitte and ICE with contribution to the R&D phase.

2010

Opening access to Audio-Visual Index to Publishers

2009

Delivery of CSI (Common Search Index) aimed to browse the CIS-Net nodes, to identify duplicate domestic musical works and to monitor the assignment of ISWCs

2008

29 million works in CIS-Net

89 CISAC societies use CIS-Net and 51 societies contribute to the network

Launch of CIS-Net AVI (Audio-Visual Information) allowing exchange of cue-sheet information

2007

October: Official launch of ‘CIS-Net powered by FastTrack’ allowing all CISAC societies to connect to the network

2005

Signature of Partnership Agreement with CISAC for the development of ISWC-Net, which assigns unique digital identifiers to each musical work

2004

First live demonstration of CIS-Net and ISWC-Net at the occasion of the CISAC World Congress (Seoul, Korea)

New Member: ASCAP (United States)

Partnership agreement with CISAC and adoption of FastTrack technology and global standard for the developments of CIS-Net.

2003

New Members: Buma / Stemra (The Netherlands), MCPS-PRS (United Kingdom), SOCAN (Canada)

Implementation of GDDN by Member Societies

Launch of what was called the ‘Global Documentation and Distribution network’ (GDDN), the first version of the networked computing infrastructure.

2002

Negotiation on membership/client relationship with CISAC societies

February: formal incorporation as « F.T., the Digital Copyright Network»

2001

New Members: AKM/Austromechana (Austria), SABAM (Belgium), SUISA (Switzerland)