Why are “new media” and streaming rights such a frequent source of dispute?

Many valuable underlying rights were granted in contracts written before streaming, download, or on-demand distribution existed, so the parties may be left arguing whether older grant language reaches new platforms. A studio may claim a decades-old “all media” grant covers streaming, while the rights holder argues the grant was limited to the media contemplated at the time. These disputes are fact- and language-intensive and rarely have a clean statutory answer, which is why they so often land in mediation or arbitration. A negotiated split of new-media revenue is frequently more practical than a court ruling on ambiguous decades-old wording. Even if the covered-media dispute is resolved, there is often a second fight underneath it: how the money gets calculated. A good example involves downloads of music from iTunes because artists typically have one royalty rate for purchases and another for licenses. Although the transaction may look the same to a consumer, defining it as a license versus a “sale” can result in two to three times more payouts to the artist.