In practice, the present music market has shown an imbalance of interests, and copyright has been losing its legitimacy and acceptance by the public. The imbalance of interests not only exists between small and larger rightsholders, but also exists between rightsholders and users and the public at large. The existing copyright theories are not able to guide copyright law to strike a fine balance between different interests, especially in the digital era where copyrighted works flow across borders easily. Rawls’s theory of justice is different from those approaches as it offers better explanations to justify the copyright legal system for balancing small rightsholders’ interests who are in a weak position in copyright licensing agreements; and balancing the public interest, such as uses for research, study and education purposes. In practice, unregulated licensing activities by means of either collective management organisations (CMOs) or independent management entities (IMEs), have raised many issues. The interrelation between the two systems is intermingled and the model of IMEs dramatically influence the performance of CMOs. A harmonised copyright legal framework is needed to regulate both CMOs’ and IMEs’ licensing activities in musical works, by which to facilitate a fairer and common arena for all kinds of copyrights management organisations. The proposed theoretical framework formulated by Rawls’s theory provides powerful and systematic standards to evaluate and assess joint management organisations’ (JMOs’) functions. The standard of multi-objectives, named economic, social and cultural objectives, is proposed for balancing interests at stake, more precisely, justifying the interests of the least well-off. Therefore, this thesis examines and investigates the issues of unbalanced interests existing in cross-border copyright licensing and, accordingly, proposes to design a fairer copyright legal framework aiming to fulfil the multi-objective of copyright – economic fairness, social justice and culture diversity.