Beatport had a license intended to cover all 27 countries in the European Union.
The agreement was with Buma/Stemra, the Dutch music-rights organization. Beatport had reportedly spent about eighteen months working through the problem of paying rights holders as the Denver store expanded across Europe.
One agreement was supposed to replace separate licenses in every country.
That was a big operational simplification if it held. The store already served customers across borders. The internet did not care whether a download crossed from one European territory into another. Copyright administration cared very much.
This was the kind of company news that reached far beyond the systems team but still landed on the systems. Territory rules affected what could be sold, where it could be sold, which catalog appeared, and what had to happen after a customer clicked buy.
I was running Beatport's technology from Denver. My daily work was servers, networks, databases, storage, and the people keeping them up. Licensing determined what those systems were allowed to deliver.
The agreement was announced as a first. A single European license for an American online music store sounded like the direction the market needed to go. It also challenged the older structure in which national rights organizations controlled their own territories.
That conflict was not resolved by the announcement. Other rights organizations would object almost immediately, and courts would get involved in August.
For the moment, the company had done something clean and ambitious: one license, one online store, twenty-seven countries.
The legal system was about to make it less clean.