Norwegian Royalty Group: You Can’t Upload Own Music to Pirate Bay

[p2p rules]

TONO tells the band Kråkesølv its management contract forbids member artists from making their music available on sites like The Pirate Bay.

TONO, a Norwegian royalty collecting group founded back in 1928, is making it tough for member artists to reach fans in the file-sharing age.

The band Kråkesølv tried to make its debut album “Trådnøsting” available for free on BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay only to find out that TONO explicitly forbids the practice of members making their music available on their own.

“The management contract in TONO means that we can not allow the TONO-members posting things on their own at some commercial sites,” says (GOOGLE TRANSLATION) TONO rep Eidsvold Tøien.

The contract it mentions is that artists agree to transfer management of their mechanical rights to TONO, and therefore are prohibited from excercising those right without TONO permission.

This means that emerging artists seeking to use P2P as a form of “self promotion” will discover that the only thing preventing it from reaching new fans is the very group claiming to be its biggest advocate.

TONO recently lost a case involving The Pirate Bay in Norway’s Asker and Bærum District Court. It was part of a group of copyright holders demanding that the the ISP Telenor prevent customers from accessing the site. The Court ruled that Telenor is not illegally contributing to any copyright violations by The Pirate Bay and that there is subsequently no legal basis for forcing it to block the site.

Zeropaid

[DaBees-Knees]

That'll teach a few artists to read the small print .