昨日のThinnerの問題は、GEMAに関らず、ネットレーベルを運営するすべての者に関る重大な事態であります。今、ネットレーベルからリリースしたアーティストが後にコマーシャルな団体に登録されると、過去にネットレーベルからリリースした、別名義を含む全ての楽曲を、ネットレーベルから消さねばならなくなります。クリエイティブ・コモンズの下に楽曲をリリースすることがイリーガルになってしまうというのです。
以下に、Epsilonlabのスタッフ、Archipelの運営者であり、Thinnerからのリリース経験もあるPheekに、Thinnerの運営者Sebastianから送られたメールの文面を引用します。
today we've got bad news, unfortunately.
We've got to suspend your releases from our website due to the reason that you're member of a collecting society. being a member of them you grant them the right to collect fees for your music. not reporting tracks doesn't guarantee they don't watch your online activity. releasing music under creative commons simply violates most collecting societies statues and thus is nothing else but illegal.
the german collecting society GEMA is founding member of an international ring of collecting societies called "fasttrack" with many international collecting societies attached. gema represents all of these agencies in germany and collects fees for them.
The GEMA statues tell that netlabels, being a contentprovider, are to pay a minimum commission for each track download (Vergutungssatze VR-OD 3, Dec 2005): this commission is 11,25 cent per download right now and raises to 12,5 cent by the end of 2006.
as we don't sell your music we can't cover these royalties.
so we take these songs down for the next time. We would like to offer your songs again with our new website ("re-upload them) and sell them at the most minimum price that is possible, so the royalties are covered and having them in the catalogue is all legal. In other words, it would be the customers paying your collecting society fees. we're not interested in making money with selling mp3s that have been online for free anyway.
