Is anyone familiar with Smart Rights (Brazil)?

[angopop]

Is anyone familiar with Smart Rights?

One of the libraries who I submitted to in the past contacted me telling that this company was able to get him Brazilian royalties he never received due to some metadata issues.

I contacted SmartRights and they got back to me with instructions to fill out a form to generate a Services contract, a Power of Attorney, and to apply for registration at one Brazilian Performing Rights Organization (PRO) — and they request SSN, passport #, address, DOB, bank act info, mother’s and father’s name; marital status/partners name — way too much information you would not give out to someone you don’t know.

The company works on a 20% commission of my earnings.

I did a brief internet search on the company with the website they gave me:

https://smartrights.za.mus.br/

their LinkedIn profile

https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartrights/

they seem legit but I want to do some research before I sign and give all that info.

Does anyone have any suggestions? What should I ask the contact at SmartRights? I’m considering talking to my music business lawyer to get his opinion…

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Ango

[uniqueplace]

hmmm… sounds like scam to me.

They ask 20% of your earnings just because your brazilian PRO can’t properly do its job?
Just ask 10 times a week your pro to do its damn job. You’ll save 20% of your earnings.

[angopop]

Is it BMI’s job to find royalties in other countries, or should I join the Brazil PRO myself?

[Bill Howard]

I thought BMI handled that info from about 93 countries.

[bobsstudio]

Sounds like scam too. “mother’s and father’s name; marital status/partners name” that’s all about identity theft.

[Michele Vice-Maslin]

I have a sub-publisher in Brazil. I will inquire with him.

[angopop]

Thanks, Michele … I would appreciate any info.

I contacted BMI and asked them if they could help with royalties ‘stuck’ in Brazil (did not answer that specifically) and whether they knew of this company (they said to do more research about the company and reach out to colleagues. I was a bit disappointed in their answer….

[Pablo]

Hey there!

This is Pablo from Smart Rights. Thanks for the interest in our work. Let me start by saying we completely understand your concern, Ango. We have to always be careful when doing business. That being said, please allow me to explain our work if you are still interested.

We are a startup company based in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo (Brazil) and San Francisco (CA), and operate for the last 2 years. As you will see in our LinkedIn profile, our associates have plenty of experience in the music market.

What we offered to you is a representation in Brazil to help you collect your Performance Rights, through a Brazilian PRO. You see, Brazil and USA have different copyright law systems. While Brazilian laws foresees payment for the master side of the song regarding Public Performance, US laws doesn’t. So, if your song gets played in a TV, movie or other medium in Brazil, you are entitled to earn not only the publishing payment part (as happens in the US – paid by BMI/ASCAP/SESAC) but also the master side (also called neighboring rights). There are literally millions of dollars retained every year due to that and they do expire in a few years.

In a nutshell, that’s what we are offering, to help you collect this money that is not going through BMI (as BMI only works with publishing rights).
Along with that, we also help with metadata optimization, so we actually use AI to help you find royalty occurrences even if a song name is mistyped or lacking information. PRO’s are not able to provide that kind of service.

I also understand your concern about all the info we asked. This is actually what the Brazilian PROs asks for signing up. There seems to be also a cultural difference between brazilians and americans when asking for personal information and I agree with you that the less the better. Nowadays we managed to reduce this need for information, but we do ask the bare minimum to do our job (e.g. SSN is not required if you can provide a different tax ID – required by the bank when making payments). We follow all GDPR data recommendations.

Because of these concerns that we only work with referrals from people that are already benefiting from this kind of service, and you found us because one of our clients said about us to you.

From our start with this service on September 2019 until now, we managed to send more than 100k USD to USA, so you see how important is this work.
Since you were referred to us, maybe your friends can tell their experience (again) with us.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need anything. We are here to help.

Happy holidays!

[LAwriter]

For whatever it’s worth – Rident is a US based Neighboring Rights collection agency that not only collects in Brazil, but across the world. They have done good by me.

[Art Munson]

Same here for Rident. https://ridentroyalties.com/

[Author]

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