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Pex is the market leader in digital rights technology. Pex ensures transparency and accuracy in attribution by bringing together all stakeholders and industries to license and manage content. Its advanced technology operates at unprecedented speed and scale, enabling transactions that were previously thought impossible. By radically simplifying licensing on a ...
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- 03/18/202103/18/2021
Pex Announces Hire of Jim Griffin, industry vet and Pho List founder, as VP of Digital Rights
Pex, the Los Angeles-based market leader in digital rights technology, is announcing the hire of Jim Griffin, digital innovator, Pho List co-founder, and music industry veteran, as a Vice President within the Digital Rights team.
Griffin has long been at the intersection of digital networks, music, and data, serving as CTO of Geffen Records, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, and President of Network Licensing at Warner Music Group. He has also been a consultant and advisor to Nokia, WIPO and...
- Fast Company, Feature story, 03/09/2021, The 10 most innovative social media companies of 2021 Text
- TechCrunch, Feature story, 02/16/2021, Tencent backs digital rights startup Pex in $57M round Text
- Billboard, Feature story, 03/19/2021, Executive Turntable: Def Jam Names EVP of A&R, Clubhouse Hires Former IG Music Head Text
- Music Business Worldwide, Feature story, 03/18/2021, Jim Griffin, a former Geffen Records and Warner Music exec, joins Pex as Vice President of Digital Rights Text
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Pex, the Los Angeles-based market leader in digital rights technology, is announcing the hire of Jim Griffin, digital innovator, Pho List co-founder, and music industry veteran, as a Vice President within the Digital Rights team.
Griffin has long been at the intersection of digital networks, music, and data, serving as CTO of Geffen Records, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, and President of Network Licensing at Warner Music Group. He has also been a consultant and advisor to Nokia, WIPO and SoundExchange. Griffin’s significant expertise in copyright has led to his status as an expert witness on copyright issues before the US Senate and House Judiciary Committee.
He may be best known for co-founding the Pho List, an on-going meeting to discuss the digital delivery of art, especially music and its monetization. Pho started over 20 years ago as a literal weekly meeting at L.A. restaurant Pho 87, where Griffin and a band of co-conspirators discussed the digital transformation of the music industry. Today, Pho is a large online community, populated with entertainment industry professionals, where business deals, the exchange of ideas, and industry-shaking news originates from.
It’s been a busy few weeks for Pex who announced the close of a major round of funding followed by being named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies of 2021”. Griffin keeps the momentum going, joining the team now bringing the catalogs of music, film, and sports rightsholders into Attribution Engine, a platform that provides social media and other UGC sites with a fully compliant real-time copyright identification, licensing, and administration solution.
Griffin is excited to play a part in the continued rise of Pex as a solution to the licensing issues plaguing online content: “I’ve been following Pex closely for years and have watched it grow from just a vision to its current state as the best-in-class identification technology. I’m enthralled to be part of the company that will bring long-awaited transparency and real-time copyright licensing to social media and other user generated content.”
Pex’s Bob Barbiere, Senior VP of Digital Rights, sees this hire as an unique opportunity for Pex, “I’m very excited about the addition of Jim to the team. As a recognized expert in the areas of copyright, metadata, and music licensing, Jim will be an immediate and invaluable asset. He has worked closely with the world’s top rightsholders and content distribution companies and comes with an intimate knowledge of the the regulatory dynamics driving the US and EU copyright reforms we are now witnessing.”
Pex, the market leader in digital rights technology, is announcing a $57m investment round. The round was joined by existing investors with additional participation from Tencent, Tencent Music Entertainment, the CueBall Group, NexGen Ventures Partners, Amaranthine, and others.
The investment will help scale Pex’s Attribution Engine (AE), the licensing infrastructure for a better Internet. AE creates a single marketplace for digital content, transforming how creators, rightsholders, and platforms do business together by enabling fair compensation and increased access to copyrighted content. It stands to break the bottleneck of online content licensing once and for all.
“Attribution is vital to the Internet; it can help protect copyright without stifling creation,” says Pex founder and CEO Rasty Turek. “AE sets new standards in speed and scale and is the first platform capable of meeting today's content growth and demands. It replaces unreliable upload filters and takedown requests with real-time use authorization and licensing, benefiting creators while recognizing and compensating those whose works are sampled and shared.”
Governments across the world are moving to put legislation in place to address the growing imbalance between social media behemoths and artists who aren’t getting their fair share. Most notably, the EU’s Copyright Directive and its Article 17 set forth decisive, market-shifting legislation with global impact to address the value disparity in a meaningful way. “We live in a world where everyone is creating, mixing and remixing copyrighted works. But the ability to rapidly identify, attribute, and license them in real-time is the missing link to address the value-gap. Instead of fearing regulations, or finding loopholes to make them toothless, what if we relied on a better infrastructure for today’s Internet?” asks Pex COO Amadea Choplin. “If we could seamlessly compensate artists – if we could enable a culture of fair and universal attribution – then we could set the stage for a truly free and open Internet.”
“The solution to this puzzle lies not with litigation, legislation, or innovation alone, but with the combined strength of sound law, breakthrough technology, and durable social norms. In short, we need a leap forward in trust,” Choplin explains.
Pex has spent seven years breaking new ground and pushing technologies to new limits. "My vision has always been to deliver a set of technologies that brought transparency, accuracy, and most importantly trust to digital rights and content” notes Turek. “I feel Pex has now accomplished that and with this round of funding we are well positioned for what lies ahead."
Over the last year, there has been bipartisan appetite for taking a bite out of big tech. From carve outs of §230 of the Communications Decency Act to Congressional antitrust hearings, to lawsuits and investigations from seemingly every three-lettered government agency in the District, big tech has had an especially tedious go of it recently. And 2021 does not seem to be any different.
Sometimes overlooked amid other more headline-worthy stories, one initiative has the potential of striking at the heart of platforms' business models – including both the largest social media companies we're all familiar with and any-sized platform that relies on user-generated content. The future of copyright online, which generates billions for platforms, will be up for discussion in the 117th Congress, and legislation across the Atlantic may play a major role in influencing how that discussion shakes out.
Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina who is also chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, recently presented a discussion draft of a bill to restructure the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). His bill, which is in its infancy and will surely go through many revisions and scrutiny in the upcoming Congress, signals a willingness to restructure the copyright regime that has, for decades, protected platforms from the effects of hosting infringing content.
However, before platforms worry about changes to their business model due to any changes in U.S. law, they will have to deal with the already passed and soon implemented European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) and its well-discussed Article 17.
In 2019, the European Union adopted new legislation called the Copyright Directive, which removes the platforms' "safe harbor" protections and replaces them with an obligation to license all content from the correct rightsholder before a user publishes said content. The failure to do so would result in potential liabilities by statute and, in some European states, additional penalties. Simply put, safe harbor protections, also currently present in the DMCA, provide platforms with a liability shield when one of their millions of users shares copyrighted content without the proper license. Once the EUCD becomes active, these protections, at least when it comes to copyright infringement, will be a thing of the past and accountability will be the new norm.
The directive, which will be implemented in June of 2021, is going to affect how platforms conduct business even outside of European borders. Conventional thinking states that creating one system for use in the European market, while running a completely different system elsewhere will be too costly, and a dangerous liability. In fact, it is likely that platforms will abide by the directive even outside of the continent's borders and pay close attention to the uploads of their users before they are published. While the directive envisions a new way forward for these companies, its spirit is to ensure that rightsholders also benefit from the success of platforms, which is due in large part to their creations.
A novel legal situation will also arise when platforms inevitably follow the directive. The aforementioned safe harbor protections present in the DMCA are dependent on a platform showing that it had no knowledge of the infringing content present on their network. However, in order for a platform to abide by the EUCD, it must, by definition, have knowledge of the content on its platform – all of it. This creates an interesting situation for platforms: should they abide by the European directive, the protections provided by the DMCA may no longer be available to them when a rightsholder decides to file a lawsuit. Since the internet, and platforms, are not bound by borders, lawyers on all sides are asking themselves: "can a platform claim to have knowledge of infringing content shared in Paris, while also claiming to not have knowledge of the same content in Los Angeles?"
Of course, this question will have to be answered by American courts, likely very soon and likely in a high profile case. A major rightsholder is bound to test this theory, and depending on the outcome, it could potentially open a floodgate of liability for America's largest companies.
While many may be thinking that this will likely only affect the largest companies in the space, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok shouldn't be the only entities paying attention. In fact, any platform of any size that deals with user-generated content will need to fundamentally change how they manage posts on their networks. Identifying solutions to these issues will be crucial to those platforms' survival.
Changing how we think about the powerful safe harbor provisions provided to social platforms will bring forth an era where creatives will finally be able to get their equitable slice of the pie when their content is shared online. Ultimately, the EU Copyright Directive, and the upcoming DMCA discussion, should not be seen as a punishment for big tech, but rather a legislative correction that balances the scales – turning a win/lose into a more equitable win/win.
Cesar Fishman is the head of business and government affairs at Pex and a government and business affairs professional with over a decade of experience in the field. Starting his career on Capitol Hill, Fishman moved to Los Angeles to work with major entertainment companies – advising them on key policy issues affecting their businesses.
Pex, the independent music and video analytics and attribution platform, has compiled the most viewed and shared videos on Twitter from May 25 - June 5, and found something unprecedented: By a wide margin, the top videos are related to protest events across the country and their anti-racist messages.
Videos posted by witnesses on the ground, often by experienced journalists caught in the heat of the moment, are being shared widely. The most shared videos document key events (the on-air arrest of Black CNN journalists), inappropriate tactics and police brutality toward protesters and peaceful bystanders, and breathtaking moments of pain and hope as protesters debated, sang, and asked police and National Guardsmen to join the march.
This content has taken over Twitter in a way previous protests, viral challenges, and political outrages don’t come anywhere close to. Eighty percent of the Top 100 Twitter videos uploaded from May 25 through June 5 are related to Black Lives Matter, with an additional 10% related to race/racism.
By comparison, for the 2017 Women’s March, less than 10% of the top videos were related. In fact, more videos uploaded during that time related to President Trump than to the march or to women’s rights. When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, again less than 10% of the top 100 videos were related. Even major trends like the Bottle Cap Challenge lag far, with only 4% of its content in the Top 100.
“What's been happening with the online news coverage and user generated content of the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality is unlike anything else that we’ve ever seen on social media platforms,” explains Wilson Hays, Pex’s Head of Business Development. “Not only have the recent uploads related to Black Lives Matter received more views than any other societal moments in recent years, but it has completely dominated the sheer volume of videos being uploaded and viewed for over a week.”
“Having 90% of the top 100 videos on a social platform at any point in time be related to one specific topic isn't only extremely out of the ordinary but it has never been seen before,” Hays continues. "We've seen the power of user generated content time and time again, however, when UGC is attached to global protesting, it makes for substantially heightened viewership to embolden the cause and it's irrefutable: the truth is in the data. This moment has unequivocally captivated the attention of social media and we can say that for the first time, we've all been watching this together.”
Highlights from Pex’s findings:
Total views:
BLM: 1.6 billion
Bottle Cap Challenge: 1.4 billion
Kavanaugh: 1 billion
Women’s March ~667 million (due to this being over 3 years old, we didn't have 1:1 views available and therefore we had to estimate the view counts. We see a clear signal that the Women's March is the smallest of the 4)
Top 100 Twitter Videos: Black Lives Matter Protests
80% BLM related
90% Race related
Top 100 Twitter Videos: Women’s March
6% Women’s march related
7% Women’s rights related
22% Trump related
Top 100 Twitter Videos: Bottle Cap Challenge
4% related
Top 100 Twitter Videos: Kavanaugh
4% related
About Pex:
Pex (www.pex.com) is the world’s foremost audio and video copyright search engine, automatically finding snippets as short as 1 second and delivering independent video and music analytics on dozens of UGC platforms worldwide. Pex’s Attribution Engine is the future of copyright management, allowing rights holders to license content in real time and online platforms to audit content at the point of upload, comply with new legislations, and block toxic content. Clients include major music and film rights holders, online platforms, and other key content producers and administrators.
Pexeso, Inc. (Pex) is announcing its acquisition of Dubset Media Holdings. For the past three years, Pex has provided copyright search and content management tools to the largest rights holders in the music and film industries. Rights holders using Dubset’s rights management platform for music distribution on major streaming services will now have access to their catalog’s use and performance in any audio and video content across social media and user-generated content platforms.
“Dubset is a company we’ve been interested in for some time,” notes Rasty Turek, founder and CEO of Pex. “There are very few companies in the music business that have successfully licensed as much catalog as Dubset, and the music rights database they’ve built is massive and rare. Our technology’s scale and speed enables broad market access by all rights holders to our rights management and analytics services, built on top of the 20 billion video and audio files in our indexed database. We feel this will prove to be a game-changing combination.”
Pex is the only company capable of providing music, film, video, consumer brands, and enterprise companies an accurate and complete picture of what, where, and how much of their copyrighted works are being distributed and consumed across all of the world’s leading digital platforms.
“The distribution of digital media via social media has outpaced rights holders’ abilities to track, license, and manage their audio and video assets,” said Bob Barbiere, formerly of Dubset, now SVP Digital Rights at Pex. “Dubset was timely and successful in filling an industry need around identification and licensing of music in mixes and remixes. This acquisition will immediately expand rights holders’ abilities to locate, protect, and monetize use of their catalog within any form of music or video currently being shared on any of the world’s largest UGC and social media sites.”
In addition to the digital rights services and data Pex now offers to rights holders, the company has announced its best-in-class copyright compliance solution, Attribution Engine. Attribution Engine identifies, licenses, and administers royalties for content across a rapidly shifting international copyright landscape. Platforms can seamlessly “plug in” Attribution Engine and be assured they have a complete copyright control solution. Attribution Engine mitigates significant copyright liability, meeting or exceeding all requirements contained within Article 17 of the new EU Copyright Directive, which promises to close the value gap between content creators and platforms.