Here on OSAlert I’ve already talked about various copyright related issues here in The Netherlands – obviously because I’m Dutch and live there. As a small nation, the copyright issues we face here serve as nice, comprehensible discussion starters that we can all grok. Well, we’ve got another one. Our own RIAA equivalent has caused quite the stir by announcing that they will start charging bloggers and social website users for embedding YouTube videos with copyrighted content. Say what?
The Buma/Stemra is a Dutchcopyright collective. Last week, they introduced a plan (called “Fair Play Music”…) in which they will start charging people for embedding YouTube (or similar) videos on their blogs or social networking website profile pages. For embedding 6 YouTube videos, you will have to pay 130 EUR per year – for 30 videos, it will add up to 650 EUR per year. The tariffs will become effective coming January 1.
Embedding music videos is a very popular activity on blogs and social networking websites. In The Netherlands, the biggest social network (by far) is Hyves, currently hosting almost 10 million profiles (on a population of 16 million). Every major Dutch artist, celebrity, politician, company, political party, or whatever has a profile. Most of those are filled with people posting their favourite music videos or other copyrighted content in the form of YouTube videos. Buma/Stemra has not yet made any deals with sites like YouTube and Hyves, but they do claim to be in talks with them – Hyves denies these talks are taking place.
The tariffs apply to more than just music videos. If you made a photo slideshow of your latest vacation in Chersonissos (the vacation spot for annoying Dutch teengers, avoid at all costs) and put some Tiesto as the background music, you’ll have to pay too. A video of grandpa playing a song for you on the piano? Pay up. And so on.
Buma/Stemra plans to detect and enforce all this using the Teezir webcralwer. Teezir announced the Buma/Stemra webcrawler on their website, and it is a fully automated solution looking for embedded audio content on the websites of Dutch companies. If you want to block this webcraler, Google is your friend.
In what I personally find exceptionally stunning, Dutch politicians are actually stumbling over each other to express their concern over this development. Three political parties in The Netherlands, the CDA (Christian democrats, currently in the government), SP (the socialists, largest opposition party) and GroenLinks (the green party) have all stated that they want the government to stop Buma/Stemra, because their plans hurt both individuals as well as artists. “This plan will seriously hinder artists in promoting their music via the web,” stated Mariko Peters, member of the Lower House for GroenLinks.
The sadness of it all is that despite the ridiculous nature of the plans, Buma/Stemra has the law and jurisprudence on its side. Dutch copyright law is very old; the original variant was enacted in 1817, but it was revised completely in 1912. The variant from 1912 is the one still in effect today, and despite being revised over time, it’s still, at its core, the law from 1912. As you can imagine, this law says nothing about embedding or YouTube.
If we shift our attention towards jurisprudence, the picture becomes clearer. While linking to articles, as well as quoting them, is almost always allowed (except in cases like linking to child pornography or bomb making), embedding pictures without explicit consent is not. There is no jurisprudence on video material, but the similarities with pictures is obvious.
Still, that does not negate the fact that Buma/Stemra is being very blunt and inefficient about it. Now they have the entire political establishment on their bum, as the news of their plans, as well as the responses, have been widely covered in newspapers, blogs, and television stations. There’s almost a universal sense of disgust. Do you really want to charge 130 EUR for a 12 year old kid embedding a few videos on his Hyves page? Is that acceptable?
What really tickled my sense of irony today was the rather interesting placement of news articles in my newspaper of choice this morning. The Algemeen Dagblad had an article covering almost two pages on the Buma/Stemra thing this morning, page 2 and 3. The rest of page 3 was dedicated to another article.
That other article’s header read: “Ten percent increase in cinema visits”.
As title, no offence bit holland is a bit of a pushover when it comes to legislation. Just look at the immigration/integration laws as well as “personal security” soon you will be as trapped by the new IT legislation as the lot of us up here in Sweden. *god bless the lobbyists* (for those that did not understand, that was sarcasm)
As a U.S. citizen who once visited, I tend to think of the Netherlands as an island of sanity. A sort of “focus on what matters and don’t worry about the rest” sort of place. Of course, it’s been 17 years since my visit. And it was a short one. So my perspective is both limited, and perhaps out of date. But I still look to the Dutch with a feeling of hope for the rest of us.
<< “the riaa needs to be disbanded.”
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I guess this is another fine example of what human greed can do.
This is totally plain wrong. If you put a video of you playing some classic music (let’s say Chopin) on the piano, then you shouldn’t have to pay copyright because, first it’s public domain, second you’re the one playing and own the copyright for the interpretation. Now, what garantee them that the track that’s playing in the video is of one of them artist member? Do they have the right to collect of other international artist?
I live in Canada and I have to pay a levy on virgin CD because some morons think that I deserve to because I could copy music on them. Well, first I don’t burn audio CD, I simply use my mp3 player, and secondly, I don’t like french canadian music () so I listen mostly to american and some european artists (english singing ones).
Actually that blank CD levy in Canada is an interesting thing. Though hailed as a major victory at the time, because of it, the CRIA (Canadian RIAA) have found it very difficult to prosecute or limit downloading of music. I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it may even be considered legal.
Suffice to say, the CRIA now rues the day they convinced the government to pass that law
We have the same thing in the Netherlands, where there’s another organisation controlling the levy. They want it on MP3 players as well, which would double their cost. Luckily up till now this has been barred by the government, pointing to a lack of European legislation on the point.
JAL
In Holland we have a similar tax. I guess they now need to start heavily taxing harddrive sales…
Finally some good news from Brein!
No more sites with music, no more annoying crap playing though MY pirated music.
Do you know gif is patented? Go get those people who use animated gifs on the web!
Maybe we could also get rid of comic sans while we are at it, it’s copyrighted afterall!
Edited 2009-10-07 22:04 UTC
Just for the record, the gif (LZW) patent expired years ago.
If I didnt know that it was October Id have thought this was an aprils fools joke .. !
Buma/Stemra must be off their rocker ..
Copyright troll deluxe .. But its in our international future .. “They want to put their mark on everything”, to quote a prophetic nuttah ..
Some forces in the world just wants to OWN EVERYTHING ! And soon charge us for breathing ..
…is currently “testing” mandatory internet filters for all ISP’s. Despite every leading authority indicating it will create major slowdowns and not provide the supposed protection they are touting for children, and major outcries from tens of thousands of respondents to petitions, they are pushing ahead with the scheme. Further, the methodology, impact and security results of the test have not, and will not be made available on the basis that it could somehow compromise the project. The Government will have total control over what is filtered and what is allowed through, without having to answer to anyone or even tell anyone if the “test” was successful or not – because there is no publicly available measure anyway.
The reason I mention this here is because of the reference to the article about cinemas. With my conspiracy theorist hat squarely in place, I see it like this.
A number of years ago Mr Gates made a comment about finding a way to effectively advertise on the internet, but nobody has really been able to do this. Progressively we’re seeing young people moving their entertainment away from the TV toward the internet because it gives them more choice and less intrusive advertising. But what does this mean for the big media moguls? Less viewers, less advertising revenue. Can’t effectively advertise on the internet so they need their viewers back. How do they achieve this? Well, by convincing Joe and Joanne Lunchbucket that the world and especially the internet isn’t safe for their kids – all those predators and terrorists have moved online now and are just waiting for the kids to log in so they can molest them over the ‘net or teach them how to make bombs – they’ve paved the way for things like this proposed mandatory filter. By getting in the ear of the copyright activists they pave the way for things like this Dutch “plan”. Once they slow the internet to a crawl and / or make it not financially viable for kids to use for entertainment purposes, well…
And the backup plan? Well if everything is filtered it’s pretty easy to embed whatever advertising / propaganda you please. Go try one of the free VPN services and check out the lovely (large) advertising section at the top of every page you load. Sadly it seems this is the shape of things to come. And if at the moment you’re thinking “pffft, thats only in Australia though – doesn’t impact me at all”. Well think about this – again, conspiracy theorist hat firmly in place. Wouldn’t you test this scenario first on a relatively small population (eg. Australia, Netherlands) just to gauge what the backlash (if any) is? In Australia, most of the population have no idea it’s even happening – because as in most countries, the population are generally very ignorant of the things their governing bodies and major corporations do to them.
Welcome to the future. Although we could be forgiven for thinking it’s actually 25 years in the past…
In a strange sort of way, I welcome this. Political trends tend to swing like a pendulum, and resisting the swing when it’s pushing in the wrong direction simply delays the time it takes for the swing reversal to take place.
We need more idiotic behaviour from copyright holders to enter the public’s consciousness. Once elected representatives realise that their mates in big business are actually alienating voters, they’ll change allegiance faster than I can change my underwear. We should cheer every time the music dinosaurs score yet another own goal, and gleefully tell as many people about it as we can.
The RIAAs of the world don’t have enough lawyers or money to stop / sue all the websites and people embedding videos.
“A video of grandpa playing a song for you on the piano? Pay up.”
Huh?
I’ll admit, I have never been to Holland, don’t know much about it or its laws. But is there any concept of fair use there?
Lets say I’m person who spended 15 years of my life dedicated to music, and by that I don’t mean downloading everything on internet. Thus I have educated myself with skill of playing bass while others made themself businessmen and computer guys with high skills. Ofc because they have such a high skill society is willing to pay them big money, mean while society thinks everything I contribute should be free. Ofc at this point you will say that I would get huge money for live playing, that would be true unfortunatly I can only dress on pink and music I play is death metal. Clearly I can’t play on live.
Fortunatly in one cold morning while eating molded bread I happen to make very good song that small record label buys. I won’t be rich but it’s enough to give some fresh bread. Unfortunatly some frat boys from business school make unfunny video where they fart and act stupid while my music plays behind and because Internet exists purely on frat boys and girls it’s instant hit pouring millions of viewers and tons of advertise money for tech geeks who own site. And what did I get, absolutely nothing.
It always reminds me WW2 documents about civil brutality, bad german nazis killing weak allies. They never show bombings that allies did at end of war on cities of germany or that brutality that german civilians had to suffer from soviet soldiers. We like to think that we are on side of small person but always forget that behind massive and evil corporates exists small individuals.
Cute story, but unfortunately things don’t work like that. First of all, RIAA and the like aren’t defending the small individuals. They only care about big names because big names means more money.
Secondly, if something is visible or audible in a video, but is not the main point of it, then it is quite silly in my opinion to sue or charge for it. Just think about it; you’re on a trip with your family and you make a traveling film and load it up on your homepage. Then you suddenly get a few days later several thousands worth of charges because there happened to be copyrighted paintings visible in a few scenes of your video. Does that sound good?
I am not saying artists shouldn’t be paid, I am just saying that there exists the Right Way to do it, and the Wrong Way.
Ugh, they did it again! Finding another way of gathering money in order to make the organization’s executive even richer.
Most musicians I know (the majority are, you know, not really famous) are completely fed up with Buma/Stemra. In the past there wasn’t a membership fee; you get only 7.5 euros PER NIGHT to play at a venue; in general it’s just a bottomless pit that sporadically shoots some coins at you from below.
Fortunately there is quite some Free work available. If you use Creative Commons content, there’s nothing Buma/Stemra nor BREINloos can do!
Here is a collection of Creative Commons music from various Dutch artist, for starters:
http://www.simuze.nl
Not here in Sweden if you add creative commons music in a movie listen to it on radio in your company +more then you’ll have to pay for it to STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society)
Edited 2009-10-09 09:38 UTC
That’s shocking news. There goes my illusion that the Scandinavian countries are much more sensible then the rest.
I wonder what gives those greedy bastards the right to earn money for Creative Commons work. They do not represent the artist who license their work under Creative Commons.
So in fact it is nothing but ordinary theft.
Scandalous
STIM collects royalties for all artists (even those that are not members because they can always get a membership later)
Currently the Buma/Stemra made a little turn:
now embedding will become free for social networks and non-commercial websites.
See http://www.nos.nl/nosjournaal/artikelen/2009/10/9/081009_buma_zwich… (in Dutch language).
I guess the next question will be about how they will be recognizing a (non) commercial blog. But I guess they still did not get the point: also commercials blogs are promoting music from the artists that the Buma/Stemra are currently “protecting”. Why wouldn’t they want free publicity for their members ? Because they can immediately earn money from it ? Still sounds a little shortsighted to me. But fortunately I am not in the music business.
Edited 2009-10-09 14:54 UTC