Ottalie Mark
The family lived at 76 Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and her father worked in the garment industry.
[5] Mark's first job after military service was as secretary to Martha Wilchinski, Head of Publicity at Roxy Rothafel’s Capitol Theatre, in the early 1920s.
[7] Mark knew that one of the ways Rothafel promoted events at the Capitol Theatre was through his weekly radio show, Roxy and His Gang, so she suggested that the Warner Theatre buy and install some used broadcasting equipment that was being sold by a tabloid newspaper called The New York Evening Graphic, to promote their events.
[12] On August 24, two weeks after the Vitaphone debut, The New York Times reported that ASCAP was pursuing claims of copyright infringement on behalf of publisher Robbins-Engel Music over the score for Don Juan.
[13] One of the compositions Axt interpolated in the score for Don Juan was "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," a tone poem by the German composer Richard Strauss.
[13] The matter was settled out of court,[16] and Heller assigned Mark to the task of creating a copyright research database for Warner Bros. Pictures to prevent further infringement claims.
She set up an office in The Manhattan Opera House and began creating an index card system documenting songs' authorship and rights holder information.
[19] In order to make the Vitaphone system more appealing than the competing sound-on-film synchronization technologies being developed by RCA and others, Otterson negotiated a "blanket" deal for popular song rights with Edwin Claude Mills, head of the Music Publishers Protective Association (now known as the National Music Publishers' Association).
It gave any film production company using Vitaphone synchronization rights to all songs controlled by MPPA publisher members, for an up-front financial guarantee recoupable against an annual per-seat tax.
[20] The added value of built-in synchronization rights made Vitaphone so appealing that, by 1928, Fox, Paramount, MGM, United Artists, Universal, Columbia, Hal Roach, and Christie were all using the equipment for soundtracking their films.
[21] In the fall of 1929, Mark left Warner Bros. Pictures and moved to Hollywood to administer The Mills Agreement for ERPI.
Slowly and patiently a filing system for the service of all these offices and studios was installed by Mark, and the copyright history of hundreds of thousands of compositions was recorded on cards.
Edwin Claude Mill's successor at the MPPA, John G. Paine, began structuring a new music rights "blanket" agreement that would not be tied to a specific equipment manufacturer, but it never materialized.
[25] In September 1933, ERPI discontinued the music rights clearance department,[26] and Mark moved back to New York.
