SCL Seminar: An Evening in Conversation with Amanda Harcourt

Amanda Harcourt is a leading authority on copyright, entertainment contracts, talent advocacy, rights management forensics, collective management of IP rights and policy, with a particular focus on music authors and performers. Currently she serves as the executive editor of fairnessrocks.com, a talent advocacy information resource for music and film, as a legal and policy consultant to CIAM (International Council of Music Creators), and is co-ordinating the litigation and media coverage associated with US federal litigation in relation to the motion picture and music for a cult film of international reputation.

Her private client work began in the early 1990s when she represented Irish rock band U2, leading a global audit of the band’s royalties as both writers and performers as administered by the global authors’ and neighbouring rights’ collecting society networks. This exercise began the process of the modernization of many CMOs. Later she conducted equivalent reviews for Sir Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and other rock legends.

She has advised on UK legislation in relation to copyright duration, rental and lending and performers’ rights and prepared submissions in relation to all three of the UK’s most recent IP reviews (SABIP, Hargreaves, and Hooper). In 2014 she drafted submissions on behalf of the Featured Artists’ Coalition to the USA Copyright Royalty Board Inquiry into Music Licensing and the US Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division Inquiry into the US PROs’ Consent Decrees.

In parallel, she has kept a foot in education: for nine years working as an Adjunct Professor at a US Top Tier law school, designing an American Bar Association-accredited entertainment law syllabus. She designed the UK Government’s National Skills Council Syllabus on Copyright and Related Rights – now in use as part of the UK’s national media apprenticeship scheme. She is a Visiting Professor at Britain’s No. 1 ranked law faculty, University College London’s Faculty of Laws’ Institute of Brand and Innovation Law.