Handling conflicts in RDR

The RDR standards allows record companies to provide rights claims or mandates to music licensing companies. The standard also allows music licensing companies to “forward” such claims/mandates to other music licensing companiess.

There are cases where an music licensing company receives two or more claims/mandates for the same sound recording for the same period of time and use type resulting in an “overclaim”. These claims or mandates may be received in a DDEX RDR-N message (i.e. a DeclarationOfSoundRecordingRightsClaimMessage) or otherwise.

In those cases, the music licensing company may wish, depending on its internal policies, to inform those companies that provided these claims/mandates of the resulting conflict. 

DDEX recommends that such music licensing companies send a RightsClaimStatusUpdateMessage to all companies that contribute to the conflict, and to include as much information as possible to enable those companies to resolve the issue. The process of resolving the conflict is, however, out of scope for DDEX.

DDEX also recommends companies who have resolved their contribution to a conflict, and have changed their mandate/claim as a consequence, send a DeclarationOfSoundRecordingRightsClaimMessage to the music licensing company that has informed them of the conflict.

This process is depicted below: