Ep.5: Wolfgang Senges, C3S (DMT 1-2-1)

What this episode covers

This week on DMT 1-2-1 Andrea Leonelli interviews Wolfgang Senges (twitter.com/wolfgangsenges), project lead and biz dev at C3S, a not-for-profit project that aims to become a new music collection society operating first out of Germany and then throughout Europe. C3S wants to make it easy for songwriters to be able to chose a Creative Commons license. See below the embeds for the questions in the interview (and their timing, so you can skip ahead if you want to) and visit http://www.c3s.cc for more information.00:37 What is C3S?02:15 In English C3S stands for Cultural Commons Collecting Society so a strong tie-in with Creative Commons as you mentioned before. What are the challenges in Germany and other European territories when it comes to musicians and Creative Commons?04:30 There are some hugely complex processes involved in the day-to-day maintenance of a collection process, how do you plan on starting out C3S as an organism that can meet those challenges?06:37 There must be an overlap at times between artists that want to be with Gema but that also want to have tracks live with Creative Commons licenses especially given how easy is to post tracks under CC on services like Soundcloud. How does that overlap work?08:00 What is the feeling amongst artists in Germany about some of the latest developments for example in regards to the deal with YouTube?09:35 Looking at the roadmap for C3S it's a of course going to be a relatively long process, what are the next steps?11:21 Do you find there are restraints or legal roadblocks in setting up an alternative to what is still essentially a monopoly since in Europe you only have one collection society in each territory?14:10 Looking at some of the companies that are making good use of Creative Commons I was quite surprised to hear that one of the artists on your panel at SXSW mentioned how the amount of usage his music was getting changed overnight when he went from free for non-commercial use to free for commercial use which really enabled him to get music licensed on a number projects - people seem to be looking for free music even in a commercial setting. But the scary part is that you could see large corporations decide to save on music and use free creative commons tracks, and does that generate enough exposure for the artist to justify the music being free. Do you see that as being a problem?17:00 And just to clarify for artists that may be listening if you do offer your music via Creative Commons allowing that to be for commercial use as well, what is the process? Do the people that decide to use the track for commercial use have to get in touch with you anyway? I guess that's a major concern for artists.20:00 That's a very important point as it makes it even more glaring how there's the need for a society like C3S that can take care of people that are using Creative Commons to help guarantee their rights. If you're an independent musician working alone with Creative Commons it may be very daunting to initiate any sort of litigation if someone breaches your copyright so having someone backing you like C3S would be pretty great.Looking at the next 12 months what are your biggest challenges as an organization? Funding?

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