German collection society GEMA wins against Youtube at court

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Maybe this came out wrong - imagine a musician from Indonesia, who has never heard of the GEMA, let alone being paid royalties by them.
This artist will not be shown on YouTube, in Germany, even if this artist insisted.

What's more, IF this artist is being shown at YouTube in Germany because of users paying for seeing him there, he will never get the money from the GEMA.
This company assumes that every artist worldwide is automatically a member of the GEMA, if he signed a contract or not. And if the GEMA collected fees and he does not show up to get the cash collected for him - his problem. Isn't this a nice business idea ?

Collecting organisations like GEMA exist in almost all developed countries, and there are international cooperations between these national organisation.

The guy from Indonesia who is not member of GEMA (which stands only for 64.000 copyright holders who are active in music) is free to put his file up on Youtube, from indoneisa, if regulations in Indonesia allow that.

Gema wants a basic fee that is fixed form Youtube, and it wants a fee for ever song stremaed that is by an asrtist whose copyright gets reporesneted by GEMA. GEMA does not wants a fee-per-stream from content it does not represents on behalf of the copyright holder.

It ocasionally happened that they did this, though, that isd right. But it is by far not the rule, and whether it is intentional or just mishappenings, is hard to judge.

It'S also not about the artists only, but also the producing and publishing companies.