During the 2019 edition of Buma Music In Motion, Open Nederland had some some wonderful news to share: our project FilterMeNiet.nl received funding from the SIDN fonds in the Netherlands!
Buma Music In Motion (BMIM) features an award show and a conference, where exchanging knowledge and hard-won experience, being inspired and maintaining your network are the focus points. The event brings together the very best minds and talents in the creative industries. Over the past 8 years, some of the world’s most influential composers, music media executives, producers, synch agents, music supervisors, creative directors and many other top professionals have participated.
Two members of Open Nederland (Sem Bakker & Hessel van Oorschot) prepared a session for media makers, rights organizations, publishers and other music professionals: U Can Touch This! A session about public domain, powerful open licensing models and why you should see copyright as a temporary privilege to control limited/free use.
Improvise! 1,5 hours before the Open Nederland session was a public discussion about the EU Copyright Directive and what this might mean for media makers, online platforms and collecting societies in The Netherlands and Europe. This session ended with many unanswered questions so Hessel (who was amongst the participants) offered the audience the option to continue the topic as part of the Open Nederland session.
A dedicated group of makers, lawyers, publishers, power users (YouTube), curators and representatives of collecting societies participated in the Open Nederland session. Some of the highlights, after we finished a lively debate on the EU Copyright directive:
- A comic laying out 2000 years of musical history https://law.duke.edu/musiccomic/download/
- Hanno Lans’ research & Wikidata queries to find public domain composers and compositions
- The RE:REC music contest to re-record public domain masterpieces. Explaining how songs like the African-American spiritual Motherless Child should not be forgotten and should be touched by talented artists like Bruce James (see audio below). Bruce is one of the 10 winners of the contest who will receive 20 copies of the RE:REC vinyl record.
- Technology and inventors challenging the status quo of the music industry: Gutenberg, Ottaviano Petrucci, Lithography, Edwin Votey’s pianola, Edison, Emile Berliner’s gramophone, radio, ipod, downloads, streaming… artificial intelligence? One thing is for sure: the speed of innovation is increasing. Deal with it, open licensing is part of the answer.
The Open Nederland session was a success. And I am confident that some of the participants in this session will contribute to a healthy, future proof music industry.