At the risk of making everyone click away from this post, there’s no question that much of the arcane law surrounding music copyright, broadcasting and related issues is boring as hell — and confusing to boot. But it is still important, and so I’m hoping at least some people will force themselves to read further: according to Billboard magazine, Sony’s music publishing division has told the Harry Fox Agency (which is responsible for licensing the majority of published music in the U.S.) to stop licensing its music for either streaming or download purposes.

As far as I can tell from the Billboard story, Sony isn’t telling Harry Fox to stop licensing existing music, but just any new music that it publishes. Why is it doing this? It appears to be some brinksmanship related to negotiations between music publishers and music services such as Rhapsody, Napster, iMeem and others — who belong to something called the Digital Media Association — over whether such streaming services have to pay a reproduction licensing fee as well as a performance royalty when they stream music or offer limited downloads.

The reproduction license was designed for physical copies such as records, discs and so on, while the performance royalty was designed to cover radio broadcasts and live performances in bars. So is a stream on the Web a reproduction or a performance? It’s stored in your RAM and possibly on your hard drive — that makes it a reproduction, according to the music publishers. But the Digital Media Alliance argues that it’s a performance. The DMA has asked the U.S. copyright royalty regulator to rule on whether it’s one or the other — and that has apparently pissed off Sony to the point where it has yanked its licensing rights.

I must have missed the news that Getty Images — one of the largest image-licensing firms around, next to Bill Gates’s Corbis — had bought a company called Pump Audio back in June and was getting into the music-licensing business. Then I read this morning on TechCrunch that PumpAudio has relaunched as part of the Getty site, offering a song-tracking and licensing tool called (what else) Soundtrack.

Although the service is starting small, with just 20,000 songs from independent artists, Getty says it wants to expand through deals with the major record labels and others — and knowing Getty, it is likely to do so with a vengeance. Maybe it will even get into the “crowdsourcing” of music, the way it did with photos by buying Calgary-based success story iStockphoto.com.

Whether Getty succeeds or not remains to be seen, but there’s no question that the music-licensing business needs some organization. Insiders — including Spiral Frog CEO Joe Mohen, who I interviewed for this recent piece — say the process of getting all the required performance and publishing rights for a piece of music is byzantine and in some cases almost impossible, since there are thousands of different publishers and no central repository of information. A real “goat rodeo,” as a friend of mine likes to say.

If Getty can help to bring some semblance of order to that process, it will not only benefit anyone who is trying to license music — including perhaps the folks at Saturday Night Live, who had to pull a hilarious video from SNL off YouTube because they apparently failed to get a license for an Aphex Twin song — but will also benefit (theoretically) the artists who make the music.