Tuesday, November 7, 2006

German GEMA Joins YouTube Party

Handelsblatt reports that the German GEMA institution – the German Society for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction Rights, who cashes in whenever you use copyrighted musical works – now asked Google to remove videos with non-licensed music. (You probably heard how almost all of the good homemade YouTube videos use some catchy – but not homemade – tune in the background.)
German Google spokesman Stefan Keuchel told the Sat1 channel that they’ll theoretically indeed follow-up on every report of unauthorized republications of copyrighted work, and remove such content (he didn’t tell Sat1 about how anyone is supposed to watch over the tens of thousands of new videos uploaded everyday).

According to the Handelsblatt report, Edel Music’s Stefan Weikert warned to think of YouTube as free advertising for the music that’s used in videos, saying that “the effect is the exact opposite, people are rather buying less music.” Must... resist... to... comment...

German GEMA Joins YouTube ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

>> More posts

Advertisement