Dutch Collection Society Looks To Charge Bloggers For Embedding YouTube Videos

[saint]

Over the past year, we've noticed an explosion in ridiculous attempts by music collection societies (often totally clueless about technology) to extend their ability to collect for positively ridiculous things (while also looking to significantly increase their collection rates). The latest, sent in by Dennis Laumen, is that the Dutch collection society, Buma/Stemra, is claiming that it's going to start charging bloggers 130 euros for every 6 videos they embed. This is, of course, technologically clueless. The embedding of a video doesn't change the fact that it's actually playing from and hosted at the original site (such as YouTube). All embedding does is allow the video to appear via the other page, even though, technically, it's all still happening at its original location. Claiming that this is somehow a "new" publication of the content is technologically incorrect.

 

www.techdirt.com/articles/20091007/0153146440.shtml

 

Can you say ......... RETARDED. Sweet Mother of God, when will these Clowns get a freaking CLUE.

[GKIye]

Yep ...

sounds incredible .. but its the truth

 

Some of these agencies are on a quest for the "Holy Grail"

In other words they are all thinking that they have found the Holy Grail

They even have plans to charge videos, samples etc who are embedded at websites / homepages of artists ... So the clue is = the artist should pay to give exposure to his / her "own" music on their "own" website ...

However thats against several international regulations who tells = that music or video files produced by person A can be shared with the visitor at the homepage of person A and should be seen as royalty free so far the visitor(s) can't make any download or known as secured files ...

Secondly the Council of Europe quoted since 2002 several articles who tells that an individual can't be seen as a broadcaster or provider so far the individual can't be related to a commercial or professional network or compagny

 

Just as a small inquiry to the reader of the article made by Saint :

The content goes about the Dutch society of the country The Netherlands

 

Belgium has also a Dutch region and is not yet following the same policy.

However Belgium has been to Court to make a royalty claim to YouTube in general because YouTube shows audio or video content made by Belgian artists / composers. The Court hasn't made yet any decission about this issue.

Result is = The past Months YouTube has deleted already lots of videos and or profiles who contains music of Belgian artists .. even content who was published at official artist profiles

Final clue = its a fight aka struggle of the biggest against the small once.

YouTube declares that they are not responsible and simply delete the content.

Conclusion is that nobody is a winner : Youtube is loosing important profiles, artists are loosing their channel to give exposure to their products and the royalty agencies don't make any money because the files are not anymore published

[Aeolus]

As a dutch guy myself and being someone who is planning on getting a webstream online in the future, i have of course been following al this. Buma/Stemra is indeed a crazy organisation. A few months ago they also had something fun : Whenever someone would have a website, and would put a player on their site streaming some internetstation (not a stream of the websiteowner itself, but just pointing to another station who was allready streaming on the internet), they should pay 780 euros a year per stream.

 

Now this all... some people in the government here allready are asking questions about if they can do this... i see people creating plugins for weblogs and cms systems that will prevent the Buma crawler from finding the content on their blogs and sites... and i see a lot of disagreement on twitter about this... (also coming from artists).