The American rules you have read do not apply here, and the difference will cost you.
This is how music actually gets made on this island — somebody's beat, somebody's chop, somebody's song translated into Papiamentu. It is also the part of the law that islanders most often get wrong, because the advice online is written for a country with a rule Curaçao does not have.
In the United States a statutory licence lets you record and release a cover of a song WITHOUT ASKING the owner, once it has been released, as long as you follow the procedure and pay the set rate. That is the rule behind almost every explainer you will find online.
ARTICLE 14 is what creates the recording right: reproducing a work that can be perceived by hearing INCLUDES making discs and other objects intended to render the work audible by mechanical means. It grants the right and attaches no conditions to it. The only permission the ordinance mentions at all is in ARTICLE 49, and that is a licence granted BY the rights holder — the opposite of a compulsory one.
So: every cover recorded on this island needs direct permission from the writer of the original song. Anyone who assumes the American rule will infringe on their first release.
ARTICLE 1 gives the maker the exclusive right to publish and reproduce. Article 13 classifies adaptation AS reproduction. Therefore adapting needs consent. That is the whole mechanism, in two articles.
AND HERE IS THE TRAP PRODUCERS FALL INTO. ARTICLE 10(2) says translations, adaptations and musical arrangements ARE protected as independent works — but the words that follow are “onverminderd”, without prejudice to the copyright in the original. Your rework is genuinely yours AND you are still not free to release it. You end up owning something you cannot put out.
The way out is inside Article 13 itself: it only catches a reworking “which is not to be regarded as a new, original work”. If what you made really is a new and original work, Article 13 does not reach it. That is a high bar and not a plan.
This island translates songs. It is a real local form, and ARTICLE 13 names translation explicitly as a reproduction. So translating a lyric into Papiamentu needs the original writer's permission, and Article 25 (below) independently needs it too, because you are altering the work.
A CAUTION ABOUT AN OLD PROVISION. Article 40 lapses the exclusive translation right after ten years for languages in which no authorised translation has appeared. It is a genuine survival of a very old treaty reservation. Do not build on it: it applies only to a work “in druk verschenen” — PUBLISHED IN PRINT — and the song you want to adapt almost certainly exists only as a recording. Whether it still operates at all is unsettled. Get permission.
Every producer has heard it. It is not true here, and unusually for anything on this page, there is a local judgment saying so.
In June 2022 the Court of First Instance of Curaçao dealt with a Papiamentu track reworked after a collaboration broke down — new lyrics, new singers, altered arrangement, but reusing the guitar intro, a trumpet-mambo melody, basslines, and two short chops of the other person's voice. The claimants argued that international industry custom lets anyone take samples shorter than thirty seconds.
THE COURT REJECTED IT, AND THEN SAID SOMETHING MORE USEFUL: more important than any custom is that OUR COPYRIGHT ORDINANCE MAKES NO EXCEPTION for the use of short music fragments. That is a ruling about the statute, not about those facts, which is why it travels to every sampling argument on this island. The text agrees with it: Article 13 says “whole or partial”, and there is no threshold anywhere in the ordinance.
READ THE REST OF THAT CASE BEFORE YOU CELEBRATE. The person whose voice was sampled was held to be a CO-AUTHOR with a veto in principle — and the court then refused to enforce the veto, holding it unacceptable that each musician could block jointly-created work. He got his name on it and nothing else. The lesson is not that you will win. It is that the court had to invent an outcome because nobody wrote anything down.
It was also an urgent-relief decision by a court of first instance, so treat it as the best guidance in existence rather than as settled law.
The counterweight, and it is also from a Curaçao court. A 2013 judgment holds that the Auteursverordening 1913 gives NO exclusive right to somebody who works in a style characteristic of them — and that general civil law does not fill the gap either.
So the line runs between the RECORDING and the MANNER. Take the audio, the melody, the bassline, the chop, and you are inside Article 13. Make a record that sounds like it came from the same room, the same genre, the same production hand, and you are not.
The word for “quotation” does not appear in the ordinance at all. There is no general right to quote. What exists is ARTICLE 16(1), and it is narrow:
ATTRIBUTION IS A CONDITION, NOT A COURTESY. The article uses “mits” — provided that — and requires BOTH the source work AND the maker to be named. Miss it and the exception does not apply at all.
It does extend to taking into another language. But read what it is: a reproduction exception written for printed anthologies and press criticism. On its face it does not reach putting a piece of somebody's record into your record. (The European Netherlands does have a broad quotation right. That is the Dutch act, and it does not govern here — this is exactly the provision people import by mistake.)
ARTICLE 17(1) allows copying limited to a few copies purely for your own practice, study or use. Making the beat at home is covered. RELEASING IT IS NOT — the moment it goes out it stops being your own use.
Also absent, and checked: no exception for performing in education, none for worship, none for the private or domestic circle. Article 12(2) runs the other way and DEEMS a private-circle performance public if people paid.
Even if you have cleared the reproduction, you are not finished. ARTICLE 25 is a separate consent gate on ALTERING a work, and music is inside the categories it covers.
NO CHANGE MAY BE MADE to the work without the consent of whoever holds the copyright. And then the sentence that matters most on this page:
IF THE MAKER HAS TRANSFERRED HIS COPYRIGHT, HIS OWN CONSENT IS NEVERTHELESS STILL REQUIRED DURING HIS LIFETIME. A producer who bought the rights from a publisher has NOT thereby bought the right to change the song while the writer is alive. Article 25(2) extends the same protection to the title of the work and the author's credit.
ARTICLE 25(3) is the safety valve: consent is not needed for changes of a kind the maker could not, in good faith, refuse.
The 2022 judgment applied exactly this, holding that the original track should not have been turned into the new one without the co-author's permission.
AND TWO THINGS ARTICLE 25 DOES NOT CONTAIN, both checked by reading it in full: there is NO anti-waiver clause, and NO separate right against distortion or mutilation of the kind the modern Dutch act has. Whether moral rights can be signed away here is a question of ordinary contract law and is untested. Do not sign on the assumption that a waiver is automatically void.
And know which country's rule you are following. Nearly everything written online about clearing a cover describes a licence that does not exist on this island.
This is a plain-language map of how the systems work, so you know which questions to ask and which clauses to look at. It is not legal advice about your contract. Once there is real money or a real signature involved, that is a lawyer's job — and it is cheaper than the mistake.