Certains d’entre vous, souvent au-delà de nos frontières, nous demandent pourquoi la page Jamendo de papa dada a été suprimée. Tout d’abord, force est de constater que le choix de distribuer notre musique sous licence libre avait ceci de bon, c’est que notre “fanbase” s’est élargie sensiblement. Quelle n’a pas été notre surprise de lires de commentaires positifs sur des blogs Français ou d’entendre un titre sur une webradio Espagnole.
Nous remercions les milliers d’internautes qui ont téléchargé, écouté, apprécié et recommandé à d’autres la musique qu’on fait. On espère pouvoir vous procurer encore de la musique libre à terme. Malheureusement, il y a un flou juridique qui plane sur la licence des creative commons, et certains s’y engouffrent (de bonne ou de mauvaise foi) avec pour résultat que certains de nos titres son tapés (avec très peu de savoir-faire en plus) en bande-son sur des vidéos qui promouvoient un produit ou un service. Il se trouve que Jamendo a encouragé ce genre de pratiques, sans doute pour mieux vendre ce qu’ils appelent leur licence ‘pro’ (qui donne accès à leur catalogue pour tout usage promotionnel et public de la musique).
Nous avions été très clair avec Jamendo, sur le fait qu’on ne souhaitait pas être repris dans leur catalogue d’éditions. Et malgré cela on a pu découvrir dans les semaines qui ont suivi des clips tels celui-ci…
LesNumeriques.com : HTC Magic
par LesNumeriques
Et malheureusement, il y en a d’autres … bien pire. Le débat est donc lancé. Sachez que notre premier album complet est en préparation. Nous sommes à l’écoute de vos propositions pour en diffuser le contenu de la manière la plus équitable pour tous!
And briefly in English…
We have received a number of emails from distressed fans after our music was removed from Jamendo. Don’t worry guys, I’m sure ‘PrePOPsterous’ is widely available on file-sharing sites by now. ^^ The reason we removed our music is that some malevolent souls stretched the meaning of ‘free non-commercial use’ (as defined by the creative commons licence) to include the use of our music in editorial/promotional web videos, which let’s face it … are pretty damned commercial (see the clip above).
What is more, after some solid police work by yours truly, it became apparent that Jamendo actively promoted such use of our music, when we specifically asked them not to. Why would they do this? The answer is that the Jamendo service recently morphed into a full-scale music publishing company. The move seemed obvious. They have an entire catalogue of music (not all good of course). They could start pitching their catalogue to advertisers, filmmakers, event organisers, producers … and pay the artists a fee. Of course the artists can’t already have a publisher, and their songs can’t be registered with a royalties agency. We were directly approached by Jamendo to appear in their catalogue for specific campaigns. We turned down the offer, because we decided to register our songs with SABAM (royalties agency in Belgium) for various reasons, which I won’t go into here. Our registration with SABAM meant that Jamendo couldn’t offer our music as part of what they call their ‘PRO licence’. Strangely enough, in the following weeks we began to see these videos crop up, with our music in the background. It is indeed a small world when your friends point out to you that they heard your music on a random (commerical) website or in a random (commerical) video. Jamendo probably thought they could get away with showcasing our music in the transition period before our music was effectively protected. Sadly they deny the whole thing. We know for a fact that they didn’t make any money with this video, but perhaps on others… Right now there is only one other such promotional video out there that we know of (for a ski resort in France … yip-a-dee-doo-dah!) Please, if you come across others, do share…
Comments (4)
bonjour papadada,
je comprends ton mécontentement, mais apres vérification, nous n’avons pas vendu de licence pour ta musique pour ce podcast “LesNumeriques.com”, puisque tu n’as pas donné ton accord pour une utilisation commerciale de celle-ci.
Il arrive que certains professionnels utilisent la musique dans un cadre commercial sans pour autant demander l’autorisation de l’auteur ou acquérir une licence d’utilisation.
Jamendo est une plateforme qui apporte visibilité et revenus aux artistes, mais nous n’avons pas vocation à faire la police sur les usages commerciaux des musiques. Creative Commons le fait. N’hésite donc pas à te renseigner auprès d’eux via leur assistance juridique, ou à contacter directement les auteurs de ce podcast.
Pour terminer sur une note plus sympathique, cela prouve que ta musique est de qualité et qu’elle plaît!
Alan de jamendo
Bonjour Papa dada et Alan de Jamendo,
(Pardon my use of English, but I have just exhausted my knowledge of French above.)
It happens that Alan is incorrect when he says Creative Commons polices license violations. Creative Commons does no license compliance activity on behalf of artists whatsoever. It is up to the copyright holder to do this for themselves, which of course they usually do not have the resources to do. I have long argued that Creative Commons or some other organisation should provide such a service, in the way that the Free Software Foundation compliance lab or the Software Freedom Law Center does for software authors.
I cannot comment on matters of fact concerning Papa dada’s accusation against Jamendo, but I am sympathetic to their concerns. I feel that Jamendo’s recent commercial ventures are likely to do themselves, their artists, and the cause of free culture more harm than good. The Jamendo Pro commercial relicensing program displeases free culture advocates like myself who do not like Jamendo offering artists commercial incentives to use more restrictive licences (the non-commercial and no derivatives licenses), and it makes artists like Papa dada who are already worried about what they see as commercial misuse of their work even more worried.
I cannot believe that these commercial ventures will result in a significant income for anything but a tiny percentage of Jamendo’s artists. Jamendo would be far better off turning that proportion of their revenue into services that their artists would actually value, like legal assistance when they discover license violations like the one above.
By offering a service like Jamendo Pro, Jamendo have made the most restrictive Creative Commons licenses appear to be the most valuable, and turned artists from being their clients to being their product. This is bad for artists, bad for free culture, and bad for Jamendo.
Matthew Davidson
Hi Matthew,
Actually jamendo pro doesn’t ask artists to change their license or encourage them to do so. As an artist on jamendo, I joined the commercial programs (and thus jamendo pro) thinking I might get lucky and get some money some day. In the meantime, nothing has changed for me or my music: it’s still out there for free download under a CC BY NC license, I just gave myself a chance of making a little money, just like when we try to sell demos at the end of a gig. Whether the music is under CC or not in these cases just doesn’t change anything. It just makes things simpler administratively for everyone.
Contrary to what you say, I think that places like jamendo pro (and there are many others doing the same thing), by proving that free music CAN actually generate money, forward the cause of free music, by proving it is not just for no-money, no-talent would-be artists, like so many people believe it is.
As for your argument that it will profit to a small margin of artists, well that’s just supply and demand. Some artists make a brand of music that’s very popular with professionals, some others (such as Social Square!) don’t. At least on jamendo pro they’re all on the same level: same accessibility, same price. Not like in the traditional industry where famous artists are less accessible and more expensive than up and coming artists.
Bonjour ! Il y’a certainement moyen de prendre contact avec ces personnes et de leur signaler… Je pense que prendre le temps de contacter ces personnes et de leur expliquer brièvement pourquoi ils enfreignent les droits de Papa Dada et pourquoi ils n’on pas le droit d’agir ainsi
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