The Gene Pool

After some bad news on the dutch blog Geenstijl regarding the questionable antics of Buma/Stemra they have found a new way.

What does Buma/Stemra do? They collect licensing fees for music productions played in the Netherlands. These licensing fees are supposedly collected on behalf of producers, musicians and other people who own these rights.

They used to collect from companies that played music in canteens, bars, but also for using music in advertising and such. But hey, times change. People are using music in different forms. And the geniusses at Buma/Stemra have now found a new source of income.

Somewhere in their offices there must have been a genius who thought: well.. there is YouTube..
YouTube has a lot of movies.
In some of these movies there is music.
Let’s go after YouTube.
Luckily there was another genius, who thought that YouTube might be a bit hard to catch.. being big and all and having more lawyers than Buma/Stemra, so they had to find something else.

The same genius had embedded a movie from YouTube on his Hyves (dutch network site) account and thought.. let’s go after the small guys.
So that was the new direction they wanted to go.

From 2010 onwards, if you are a webmaster, and somewhere you have embedded a movie from YouTube there is a chance that you’ll receive a letter from Buma/Stemra telling you to pay a licensing fee for this movie.

The fees can be found here [dutch alert].
But basically it is as follows:
6 embedded files —> fee 130 euro’s
12 embedded files —> fee 260 euro’s
30 embedded files —> fee 650 euro’s
If you have more than 30 embedded files, you’ll get an additional 650 per block of 30.

Wow.. pretty soon you’re talking serious money here.

But is it allright? Some things seem very strange
- you are not even hosting the movie, it is an “open” link from YouTube.
- how will Buma/Stemra show that they represent that specific artist.. Nine inch nails for example give their cd for free / or as much as you want to pay. So if it is a movie from Nine inch nails, is it then allowed.
- How can i know which music is right free and which not…
- What happens if YouTube removes the video and i paid my licensing fee.. That means that i can’t show the movie anymore, even though i paid for showing. Will I get my money back? Probably not.

Lots of questions that the Buma/Stemra genius probably never thought about. Let’s wait for the first lawsuit of some one who got an invoice and refuses to pay..

Keep up the good work Buma/Stemra: this way you’ll surely promote the music industry with it’s failed market model. I’m going over to Sellaband to see if i can find some good tunes there.

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