Open Letter: Dear Mister Minister, Mr. Van Quickenborne,

Common Rights

The growing digital market has been glowing with possibilities for any artistic talent to create works, show and distribute them towards the world, for fairly cheap prive and in the most alternative forms imaginable. There are even alternative licenses on the market, like the known Creative Commons platform, which allows more around copying and distribution of protected works. This doesn’t need the artist to join artists-right organizations, while claiming all rights away with a signature and being limited with the promotion and distribution and more of her/his own works.

Technology has strived forward with micro-components, where the known walkman has become nothing larger than the size of a cigarette lighter. It is because of this digital age around micro-technology, that the passion to create music has never become so easy and cheap, through digital recording methods. Although, a work in production will take a lot of space, LOTS of space; mostly even more than 20x of a finished piece; because of all separate tracks (multitracks), samples, formats and extras involved with the production of such.

Still, it is not to be ignored that in the 20th century, works are being copied illegally; even on larger scale. That’s why there has been the start-up of Auvibel; the organization collecting taxes on all writable media like CD’s, DVD’s, K7, minidisk etc. This tax has to be paid by every end-user in Belgium, even when the media has been used only to store own works on. The collection of this money goes to rights-organizations. This is very bad to digest by many Belgian artists, because they are not getting any money of this entire operation, unless we sign away our rights to such rights-organizations like Sabam.

It doesn’t stay with this, Auvibel will start at 1 february 2010, to collect a tax on all disk drives, memory cards, usb-sticks, mp3/mp4 players and set-top boxes.

So, we, producers of the new digital world have to pay more taxes on media which we are using exclusive to store and manipulate our own works; while this tax benefits only a small amount of artists, the members of a “rights organization”. Also very important, newer devices like sequencers, samplers, sound modules use memory cards, disk drives and usb-sticks massaly by the dozens, which all will be taxed soon?

Why, does the indie artist have to pay for the lost income and compensate for the other artists, while we can’t even have the same arrangement and only have to caugh up money? We don’t even get a chance for adoption for other license terms with these rights-interest organizations and we are already getting taxed for more giving away money to these organizations not wanting to support us without draconian signout deals.

There are a lot of Belgian artists not wanting to connect to a rights-organization like Sabam, for variour reasons:

• They won’t get a choice what can be done with their own works regarding distribution and conditions;
• Different new distribution methods are being taxated with the old stamp;
• Sabam artists cannot create free music without being collected (CC, freeware);
• You can’t burn your works on CD to promote yourself without paying their own tax;
• Because of the agressive tactics this organization has (party’s, cafe’s and CC usage);
• Works under your own name are automatically property of Sabam; even if the artist does not want this

In the US there is a system where “Creative Commons” licenses work together with “Copyright Control”.

This is already adopted by very known artists like Radiohead and NiN and is in discussion with our neighbour countries , the Netherlands and France; so why can our own Belgian artist can’t be him/herself, without being mentally forced with their own works? This shouldn’t be a trap but a challenge for our Belgian talents.

Maybe, it’s urgent to change things from the past towards the future, because the current business model of a license on cd, is not anymore the only product available on the market. They changed the business-model slightly in the US, because the cat is already out of the bag since the digital age has allowed quick production and reproduction. Artists can choose their own license and distribution model, where they are quicker motivated to connect to a rights-organization defending their believes without shooting themselves in both feet.

European stores are very afraid to sell/export their storage-media products to Belgium, because of the strict regulation of import by Auvibel. This has changed our market to only a few familiar brands to be available in the Belgian stores, making it impossible to get better and designed cd’s and dvd’s without being outside the country. The market is very closed with this, where Belgium looses a lot of income with the use of new technologies which our neighbour countries already have for some time on their markets.

By charging this tax, you will punish the common artist of the future and you won’t leave a positive image, that our new, innovative digital world and it’s social happening gets embraced and supported, which the Belgian culture and market will only helps to get bigger. Our neighbour countries already have given a nice signal towards their artistic talent and I hope little Belgium will do the same towards the entire creative happening of audio and video.

As end, here a few links:

• Homerecording.be: open letter of artists protecting themself against the Auvibel tax
• French deal highlights open licensing and collecting societies in Europe
• Improbable Match, CC And Collecting Societies In Europe
• CC-NL/Buma pilot for flexible rights management
• Muziekindustrie, wake up for alternative licensing!
• Sabam, really for the common? (open letter in progress)
• Facebook group: against the Auvibel Taks

I am convinced that my letter will give you some insight towards a revision of your decision, hereby I sign,

yours sincerely,

So, how about gearing up your studio with a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for free? Sounds almost unbelievable when you know Protools, Nuendo and others cost hunderds of euros to buy. I’ll present you Ardour, the open-source audio workstation, available for os X (Tiger & Leopard) and any major Linux distribution (Slackware, Debian, Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo) on the street!

It has unlimited undo/redo, multichannel recording, track punching, full automation, pro mixer, hardware control from surfaces like the Bitstream, Mackie or Novation Remote, timecode synch, unlimited tracks & busses, LADSPA and LV2 and limited VST plugin support and an advanced routing system you could only dream of. It has audio-for-video features, persistent undo functions and supports multiple languages. It’s capabilities are similar to it’s professional variants, but ready to rock and roll; and if you really like this software, you could help the Ardour development by giving a tip to the author without breaking the bank!

It was supported thanks to the SAE Institute (Munich) which came a corporate sponsor of the Ardour Project in April 2007. This collaboration led to the development of an os X version of the first Linux-based software. The developer, Paul Davis has created a masterpiece which has an easy overview and which is easy and relaxed to use; just like any DAW should work!

This genious piece of software is available at www.ardour.org

Some other interesting free DAWs and sound editing software:

• Acid Xpress (a free, 10-tracks edition of ACID software for music recording, editing and mixing. Easy to use, even if you never did loop-based music ceation before! When you’re ready, publish your song to ACIDplanet.com)
• Kristal Audio Engine (16 audio tracks, 32bit, 44.1 to 192kHz sample rate, VST support, ASIO low latency, 4 KRISTAL Plug-In slots)
• Audacity (free audio editor, it just does the work! Comparable with a light version of Cooledit/Audition)