You can write a poem however you damn well please. You can take a photograph, you can paint. But you can’t play a song so freely. If you’re a musician, you need to get permission from lawyers and rich guys before you do your thing.
An Open Notebook
You can write a poem however you damn well please. You can take a photograph, you can paint. But you can’t play a song so freely. If you’re a musician, you need to get permission from lawyers and rich guys before you do your thing.
And as I’ve recently learned, in parts of Europe you need permission from a gov’t run bureaucracy
but at the same time, when you are a musician and a radiostation plays your song you will get money for this advertisement.
tell Volvo or Mercedes about this! ;-)
If a radio station plays your song, the money goes to the promo people and the company which invested in their time. The musician gets a token payment.
what is a ‘token payment’?
What I mean is that the amount of money which musicians stand to earn from radio play is insignificant. It’s an honorarium.
I think in Holland the situation is the same.
Marco, can you say a bit about the intellectual rationale for copyright in Holland? In the US it’s an incentive for arts and sciences, ultimately to benefit the public. (The “progress clause.”) What’s the analog in Dutch law?
I am not sure if I understand you correctly.
In Holland this law is called Auteurswet en Naburige Rechten. One for the author and one for the performers.
BUMA protects the author and the SENA the performer. There is also a STEMRA organisation in Holland which protects material rights (CD’s, but also virtual downloads). You have to be a member of BUMA/STEMRA and SENA to recieve money.
The SENA, collecting performance rights, is 15 years old. This type of organisation is unique, because people get paid when they are on the radio, even if they are not the author of the piece.
I am not a member of any of these organisations. because of this, the money they are also collecting on my name, will never be mine.