Six Copyright and Related Righst Collective Management
Organizations (CMOs) currently operate in Israel: two manage
traditional copyrights, two manage rights in sound recordings and
two manage performers' rights. Until the late 1990s, these
CMO's operated free of any form of regulation, leading to
complaints of monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. A bill
introduced by the Ministry of Justice in 2006, intending to
establish a copyright (royalty) tribunal, ran aground in the
Knesset.
It was thus left to the Antitrust Authority to attempt to step
up and regulate the field, and indeed, pursuant to the
Authority's vigorous actions in the early years of the
millennium, the Antitrust Tribunal ruled that the collective
management of rights of the owners of musical works by ACUM the
Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers in Israel, and
the collective management of the public performance rights in sound
recordings by the two CMOs representing the owners of
