image by: mushroom and rooster licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND license

UPDATE: The petition location has changed: http://www.musicfrom.nl/bumawakeup/

Last week, Ard Boer of dutch independent music label RaRa Records and Lopend Vuur podcast co-host contacted us (Simuze) if we were interested in joining his petition to allow for more flexible contracts by the Dutch music rights collecting society Buma/Stemra.

The current situation in the Netherlands is that by becoming a member of the collecting society you’ll have to transfer all your exploitation rights exclusively to them. Any musician or composer that wants to get the money collected in their name has to become a member of this (actually on paper 2 organizations) organization or else they’ll never will get this money. This rights collecting society has been granted the monopoly right to collect rights by the government. Basically this situation stinks and we want to see it changed:

We want to see more flexible contracts (= non-exclusive) for members of the rights collecting society which allows them to choose the conditions under which to release their own music and for instance use CC licenses for this.

So, off course we joined his effort and thus I’m writing this here on my blog. Although there might not be so many reading this blog, I would like ask the few visiting to go an sign this petition:

http://www.musicfrom.nl/bumawakeup/

Ps: For all non-dutch people, it’s a Dutch organization and it would be better for this cause to have loads of affected Dutch people sign it instead of loads of non-affected non-Dutch people. Instead we would like to urge you to start your own petitions, in the hope that we can see a change in the contracts used by the rights collecting societies all over the world and that initiatives like the Creative Commons licenses can be used in conjuction with a rights collecting society membership.

Please spread this message! Contact your Dutch friends, start your own initiatives and raise awarness!