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The death of free blogging

October 25, 2009 |

We were quite shocked when the news hit us a few weeks ago. A Dutch organization protecting the rights of musicians in the Netherlands (like the American RIAA), called Buma, presented a list of tariffs Dutch website owners will have to pay for using music in embedded audio or video elements. If you have up to six videos containing protected music on your blog you will have to pay the modest (ahum) sum of EUR 130 (over USD 190) in compensation! And if you have more, you will pay more.

Now, I can understand why musicians want to be paid when their works are used in commercial video’s or when it’s broadcasted on the radio. But this specific billing practice strikes me as a bit too much, to be honest. In the case of one of our clients, for example, who has a website that adds around 1000 video’s having copyrighted music every year, they can expect a bill of just over EUR 22000 (yes, that’s over 32 thousand American Dollars!). Their annual income for that website is just over EUR 2500! How can that be fair?

Their view is that embedding copyrighted music is the same as re-publishing the music. In which case you need to pay. I know, artists are underpaid and CD-sales are still dropping, but since when are bloggers overpaid? The boy living next door to you probably has his own blog and will probably have some music videos (which are created to promote artists and their music) on that blog. I’m quite sure the price he will have to pay for this re-publishing exceeds his monthly allowance. And I’m quite sure he won’t be aware of the fact that he might have to pay for including these videos in his blog.

Besides that, Buma, while saying it protects the rights of member artists, probably does more harm than good this way. It’s important for small artists to be exposed on the internet. But now a website owner will have to weigh cost against benefit for every poster music video. An unknown artist will probably not generate enough exposure to be cost-effective, so website owners will tend to post more videos that have high demand than videos by unknown artist. Now how, in any way, is that going to benefit the artists?

And that doesn’t even cover the average blogger, who doesn’t want to make money at all, but just keep a journal of things he or she wants to talk about. Buma doesn’t distinct non-commercial webmasters from commercial ones. There’s only one conclusion: Buma has really lost it now.

Jaap Haagmans works at a Dutch internet company called Rely Websolutions. His main tasks are internet consultancy and Ruby on Rails webdevelopment. He also recently started the video blog The Tapes .net to join bloggers in their fight against Buma.

Article Source: The death of free blogging




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