On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 07:25, Danny Piccirillo < [email protected]> wrote:
> I've been talking to someone from an awesome music service in Iceland > called Gogoyoko, and they give 100% of music sales to artists, along with > 40% of ad revenue, plus the option for artists to donate %10 of income to > charity. Apparently, Icelandic copyright law is making free culture licenses > (and all creative commons and other semi-free licenses) kind of useless, at > least with music. > > It's something about 3rd party distributors must pay royalties to STEF, > even if the artist isnt' a member, and they can't distribute it under the > license the artist may have wanted. So, if I am an artist in Iceland, and i > put my music under the FAL or CC-BY-SA, and i upload it to Gogoyoko, they > still have to pay a royalty and distribute it with all rights reserved. I > know, this doesn't make sense because it violates the artist's license, but > apparently this is law. Since i don't speak Icelandic, and Google translate > kind of sucks for it, i don't understand the problem well enough to think of > solutions. I'm hoping somebody can provide better insight and perhaps > translate the relevant documents > > STEF: http://www.stef.is/ > That law: http://www.althingi.is/altext/stjt/1992.057.html > Okay guys...found an English translation. Listen to this: "Copyright organizations which have received formal legal recognition 1) in accordance with the first paragraph shall be entitled to general collection of royalties for performing rights, for authors who are not members of the organizations as well as members, provided they have previously been authorized to act on behalf of a substantial number of authors." This is from article 23, viewable here: http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text.jsp?file_id=128157#LinkTarget_1121 While it appears to be talking about performance rights, they apparently define that in such a way that radio broadcasting and internet streaming falls under that category. So, this appears to confirm that STEF, the music collectors society, does indeed collect royalties for all music in Iceland, regardless of whether the artist is a member. Most artists choose to join so that they can actually receive the royalties that are collected. Is there a way around this? If not, can something specific to this law be appended to Icelandic ports of free culture / semi-free licenses to circumvent this? If not, is out only option to reform the law? Any advice on that one?
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