Mark Isherwood
Mark spent 18 years working for the MCPS-PRS Alliance (now PRS for Music), the UK music rights collecting society and one of the biggest in the world, in senior management positions.
He was responsible for the development of strategies and policies for substantial rights negotiations with a range of licensee industries, including all the major UK television and radio broadcasters and the video industry. From the mid-1990s, as Director of New Technology, he was responsible for the gathering of knowledge concerning rights-related new technology developments worldwide. This high profile role led to participation in the UK Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit Study (e-commerce@itsbest) which set out the UK Government’s e-commerce agenda.
Since helping to establish Rightscom, Mark has undertaken rights acquisition negotiations for a major pan-European broadcaster. He has worked with Sony Music Entertainment in a range of activities revolving around the analysis of their system requirements in the management of digital music. Mark also led a team of Rightscom consultants in a project for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) examining the intellectual property rights (IPR) consequences of using Creative Commons licences in the HE and FE sectors and, along related lines, lead a multi-party project for the European Commission assessing the value of the public domain to the digital ecosystem.
He is currently the lead consultant for Rightscom in the support of DDEX, an organisation developing standard XML messages and other supporting standards for the exchange of information relating to the management of digital media content and rights with the current focus on the music industry. He has been the non-voting Chair of the Global Repertoire Database Working Group since 2010, which has been developing a global database, which is a single, comprehensive and authoritative representation of the global ownership and control of musical works.