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German Copyright Group To Collect From Creative Commons Event
bs0d3 writes "In Leipzig, Germany, an 8 hour music/dance party event was organized to play nothing but creative commons music the entire time. A German copyright group called GEMA told the organizers that to be certain that no rights were infringed, it would need a list of all artists including their full names, place of residency and date of birth. After the event GEMA sent an invoice for 200 euros. They claim that behind pseudonyms some of their artists may be hidden and produce things that they would not earn anything from. According to German law, you are required to prove that an artist is not with GEMA. So even though GEMA probably does not have rights to any of the music, they are not required to prove that they do."
Sorry if this is off-topic, but I desperately need to find out what Sourceforge's top downloads are. Does anyone know where I can get this information???
It has become necessary that we all ignore copyrights from this point on, in civil disobedience. This has really gone too far. Take a look - an organization that represents a minority of the population's interests, can have more privileges than all other citizens, and other citizens are obliged to that minority. this is against democracy. property rights, cannot come before democracy.
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This is really sick, and sadly the same here in Hungary. A specific rightsholder group is granted legal monopoly on all the music business, and there is no way for art to exist outside them. They also have the right to tax all storage media because "they would be used for piracy anyway".
I asked our beloved SAZAS about this matter. The question specifically was: what was your opinion on playing open-source / cc music in a waiting room? The reply was that since all authors must report to SAZAS and report their incomes and creative commons authors do not, such music was illegal in Slovenia.
A German copyright group called GEMA told the organizers that to be certain that no rights were infringed, it would need a list of all artists including their full names, place of residency and date of birth.
So, to be sure no rights are violated, they need to be given private details about 3rd party individuals that they have no right to know?
As far as I know, the GEMA wants money per view for the videos on Youtube. Even if they only want a fraction of a cent, they'd bleed Google dry in matter of months with that model. Google offered to give them part of the advertising revenue from the "offending" content, but the GEMA says it's against the current German law, or some bullshit.
I have long opposed extreme copyright terms and bad copyright law, and supported the public domain and creative commons licensing - but I have also supported paying artists for such work as they have copyrighted. I have always tried to buy a legitimate copy of music I like, where it has been available, and encouraged others to buy legitimate recordings.
But this is simply too much. If the copyright organizations are going to insist on collecting money for works they do not own nor represent, then they can go to hell. Really, this is just extortion. They deserve no more sympathy.
Well, for some "moderate" rebellion the band "Eure Mütter" ("Your Mothers") already has a song titled "Der Typ, der bei der GEMA die Titel eintippt, ist ein ganz blöder Penner" ("The guy who enters title data at the GEMA is a very stupid bum")
And the song is basically about how they made the song just that somebody at GEMA has to enter that every time it is played. (They even made it longer than 4 minutes, so that it has to be entered in BOLD) ;-P
YouTube Video
Guys, the TFS is bullshit. Germany has no concept of "copyright". But even many Germans don't know that.
We have "Urheberrecht", which is like "authors' right". The privilege of the original author to get something for his work. As opposed to the privilege to "copy" (usually the badly paid works of others).
The former once made sense in pre-Internet times. The latter is based on the lie that one could actually control who makes a copy of what information, and was designed to abuse artists from the very beginning.
The GEMA was originally there, to collect the money for those artists, and hand it straight to them. That service did cost a small monthly membership fee.
But nowadays, the GEMA is a bunch of 80+ dudes that keep practically all the money for themselves and buy seconds yachts and huge mansions.
While the membership fee is more expensive than what they get out for 99.9% of the artists. (I'm not even exaggerating.) Most members get something like 50 cent or less.
But GEMA acts like if you don't do anything, you're automatically a member. Without asking you.
And if you want out, they often simply act like it didn't happen and keep collecting "for you" anyway.
Oh, and their fees for "performing" a song are crazy high. High enough that no Internet radio station here could afford it, even with lots of advertising. (We tried, and had to shut down.)
It's called the "GEMA Vermutung", the GEMA assumption. As (allegedly) the vast majority of musicians are represented by the GEMA, the assumption is that any repertoire played at a public event contains music by artists which are represented by the GEMA. Since this is civil law, there is no "in dubio pro reo". Each party presents information supporting its own position and the judge decides which side has the better case. In the past, the GEMA only needed to point at its membership roster to win. That's why there is now (due to this current case) an effort going on to list more non-GEMA artists than there are on the GEMA roster, to overturn the GEMA assumption and require the GEMA to provide actual information that GEMA licensed music has been played before they can collect.
The main problem with "your own creation" is the part, that is not your own creation. As all creations are cultural creations, e.g. only possible with a cultural and social background, and any (theoretical) creation that isn't founded in the social and cultural background, is non-understandable for any other than the creator and non-distingushable from random noise for everyone else, every creation is 95% background and 5% original creation. But it gets protected as if 100% of it was solely the accomplishment of its creator. A property has its welldefined limits, where it is easy to say where the property begins and what belongs to the environment around the property. Patents at least attempt with the claims system to point out the limits which distinguish between background and creation, but normal works of Arts don't. There is no claims list where the artist points out which of the work is reference, quote, copied from somewhere else, taken from nature etc.pp., and of which part the artist thinks to be actually his original creation. Persiflage and satirical usage can further muddy the water
If you look into court cases of plagiarism, you'll notice how complicated the differentiation between "original" and "non-original" can get, and how it depends on the actual argument of lawyers and quoted precedences, which part of a work is "creation" and which is not.
The idea of "give the creator the right to his creation" is well intended, but often very naive and unworkable. Sadly though, I have no solution how to improve on the idea to make it workable.
No. It is a terrible idea.
What if you buy a BMW 1201Whatever and later on this car becomes a classic collectors car, making it worth more money than it originally was? Shouldn't BMW get some of the money?
What if you buy a designer shirt from Le Whatever and later on this shirt becomes a "vintage" collectors shirt, making it worth more money than it originally was? Shouldn't Le Whatever get some of that money?
What if you buy a house and later on property prices go up and the house becomes worth more than what it was. Shouldn't the person who sold you that house get some of the money?
No. When you sell something, you've sold it. Meaning you've lost all claims to it. That is the risk of selling something. You may lose future income, but you have also protected yourself from the item losing value by realising its value in cold hard cash.
If the artists want to profit from future price rises, they should sell a share of the paintings. They can then still profit from future price rises, but obviously they have to take the risk of the painting actually decreasing in value over time.
The artist having the cake and eating it too is not fair. Not fair at all.
This is beyond ridiculous. These people live outside of reality (and at our expense).
With this in mind, US copyright was created as a balance, an incentive to people to produce in return for a LIMITED copyright before the works fell back to the public domain. Limited used to mean 14 years, as in people were personally supposed to see their own works go out of copyright to have incentive to create more to keep the money coming in.