Become a Member
It doesn’t matter if you are a music author or if you just are a music lover: In any case you can help us to realize the historical project of the first alternative collecting society for music authors after GEMA in Germany, and, in a second step, the first truly European collecting society featuring Creative Commons Licenses. For music authors we offer the full membership and for all others there is the possibility to become an investing member.
As a full member, you hand over at least three of your works to C3S for rights exploitation. You subscribe to at least one cooperative share (worth 50 Euros, which will be paid back after leaving C3S) and immediately have full voting rights in the annual General Assembly. When assigning rights to your works, you can use all Creative Commons licenses in addition to “all rights reserved” – you have complete freedom of choice. If you are already a member of a collecting society, you can still become a C3S member. EU legislation will make it possible to transfer one or more rights areas (e.g. online, live, audio media) to us.
IMPORTANT: The C3S has not yet been approved by the DPMA (the German patent and trademark office) as a collecting society. We currently have too few members to prove our economic viability as a collecting society on this basis alone, and we are going a rocky road via grants and a lot of voluntary work on the foundations, whereby we are walking a tightrope between legal requirements and the preservation of our ideals. Only when we have achieved this can we become active as a collecting society and pay out royalties. We assume that many dissatisfied GEMA members and non-members will want to become part of the C3S when we are admitted in Germany. Unfortunately, this is of only limited use to us at the present time to prove our sustainable viability to the authorities in charge. More members (preferably with a lot of repertoire) would make our job much easier.
Investing membership
Also those who cannot (or do not want to) bring musical works into the C3S are welcome.
As an investing member you support the work of the C3S without handing over authors rights. It does not matter if you are a musician or not. You subscribe to one or more shares of 50 Euro each, which will be paid back to you when you leave (after a blocking period). As an investing member you help us to improve the structures of the collecting society and can give us advice.
This is what you got to do:
1. Fill in the form online
2. Check & send data
3. Check e-mail
4. Sign the form we send you and send it back to us
5. Transfer money
6. Receive the membership certificate 🙂
