Re: CWR - Common Works Registration

On May 5, 2014, at 7:17 PM, Ian McEwen <[email protected]> wrote:

> There's a couple places something like this could be hooked in, at
> various timeframes. The first thing to note is that the community is
> generally not fond of fully automated imports, at least not without very
> comprehensive checking.

I read about that and fully understand what it is like to try to combine data from various sources. One of the advantages of CWR is that a lot of data checking is built into the specification. The usual workflow is for a publisher to submit a new work to one or more societies. The submission is checked by each and is either accepted or rejected. MB could allow only CWR works that have been accepted by a society, have an ISWC, and IPI numbers for all interested parties.

> More directly useful for you might be the interface geordi itself will
> use for providing the data to MusicBrainz for editors, that being
> so-called "seeding" of our various editing pages ([1] for
> release-oriented fields -- somewhat less documented, and generally done
> via GET rather than POST, for other forms). These interfaces are used by
> most of the userscripts that ease the process of importing data from
> other sites (e.g. discogs, bandcamp, jamendo); most of them are for
> releases, but http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/94676 is at least one
> that provides importing tools for works (in this case, from JASRAC).

Thanks, I'll look into this and geordi and see what might be possible. It seems life would be easy if CWR is just dumped into geordi, and geordi becomes smart enough to handle all of the matching/inserting/updating.

One question about schema. CWR represents writers and publishers on a work in a hierarchy. So a writer is almost always associated with a publisher on the work and sometimes can have different roles with different publishers on the same work. I see how writers and publishers are linked to works in the MB database, but I'm not sure how the work-publisher-writer would be represented in the database schema.


> For the longer-term possibility of putting it in a tool like geordi, I'm
> curious where we'd source data in this format; is it possible to
> download this data directly (and for fairly unrestricted use) somewhere,
> would it need to come through some sort of negotiated official channel,
> or something in-between?

I'm not aware of anyone that allows unrestricted CWR downloads, but I have not looked into it. I think there is lot of upside and little downside for publishers and writers to have this information in a publicly available repository. Same for music administration companies. We currently send (different) custom reports to companies like YouTube and Sound Exchange to help publishers and writers get paid for online works.

ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN have recently created MusicMark which allows one CWR submission to be processed by all three organizations. This might be a good starting point for a negotiated official channel.

http://musicmark.com

> 
> Hopefully my description is helpful/informative, and of course feel free
> to ask further questions if you have them!

Very helpful, thanks!

John DeSoi, Ph.D.