MyWerx Offers Innovative Copyright Ownership ID?

Billboard magazine’s current issue (cover date August 21) includes a feature story titled 10 Best Startups of 2010, profiling companies that “share a vision that the best days of the music industry are not behind us, but still lie ahead.” One of the featured startups is Nashville-based MyWerx, a technology company that develops cloud computing software solutions to optimize copyright ownership identification. With a mission to allow creative artists to concentrate on creativity by making it easier for them to manage their catalog at all points in their career, MyWerx allows creators to catalog their works, protect their interests and connect with business partners. The service is aimed at anyone who owns and/or licenses a work.

For record labels, publishers and performing rights organizations MyWerx offers a way to modernize the record collecting process.  After a work is created, the author logs onto the MyWerx site and registers the work, which is added to the author’s database of works. If the work has co-creators, all need to validate the information before the work is secured and finalized by MyWerx. This helps to eliminate problems and discrepancies that can arise if too much time passes before a work is registered. Each step in the validation process requires consensus of the parties.

Tim Smith

MyWerx was founded by Tim Smith, the entrepreneur behind innovative copyright administration systems Copyright Management, Inc. and Copyright.net. MyWerx Chairman Tim DuBois is VP/Managing Director of ASCAP. The MyWerx advisory board consists of former National Songwriters Association President Steve Borgard, Copyright Management CEO Terry Smith and veteran Nashville publisher and former Atlantic Records head Barry Coburn. The foundation of the MyWerx platform is a validated-wiki, copyright registry. Registering and validating a work is a free service to help creators and their representatives organize a portfolio of the life’s work of an author. Premium subscriptions provide access to services that will benefit all stakeholders in a work.

Subsequent MyWerx versions will allow storing and communicating with business representatives of a work and track copyright ownership transfers throughout the life cycle a registered work. MyWerx promises to continuously research and develop forward-thinking copyright focused services that bring value to the global copyright community.