YouTube's seven-year stand-off ends | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's seven-year stand-off ends

bbc.com

110 pointsseycombi38 comments

German here. I'm happy that the whole thing is finally over, but also at the same time very angry that GEMA succeeded in getting it their way, once again. I don't think it's known how much money really changed hands, but knowing Google and the scale of the situation, I think it's a fair bet that GEMA got a huge sum out of this.

Its not for free for the viewer either:

>clips flagged as containing Gema-protected tracks can now have adverts automatically added to them to recompense the songs' creators.

So now you will have to watch more adverts than people from other countries. And the presentation of the song will worse too, i wonder how artists will like their clips being butchered and filled with adverts.

Youtube for some time now places adverts in middle of clipps too, that just ruins the whole experience.

I agree, if for music videos I always could find another source GEMA free, the same couldn't be worked around for conference videos.

There were quite a few talks I missed, because of GEMA.

In the end they won, just like those guys that come around talking about how life is dangerous and accidents do happen.

This is how I see GEMA and their "business".

It's sad, as there are also constant complaints about GEMA from artists. They serve themselves only, not artists.

Just like GEZ.

Its entirely unknown who succeeded or not since both sides have agreed not to disclose the deal.

I think its likely that Youtube just got it their way but the non-disclosure is part of the deal so GEMA can still present it as a victory, and does not have to answer questions about their relevancy.

Before, YT was completely unusable in Germany. You're right about GEMA, but it's a win for most ordinary people. Unfortunately many other streaming sites are useless still in all of EU. Netflix for example. Only with VPN through United States or maybe Britain do you achieve full value.

  > Before, YT was completely unusable in Germany

This is gross exaggeration. I use Youtube extensively and I encountered a blocked video maybe 3% of the time, and only when looking at music videos. Even when that happened I simply enabled the (installed but usually remaining disabled) Proxmate Chrome extension to use a proxy and get the (music) video anyway. The change is welcome but won't have much of an effect on me. People using Youtube extensively for music - and "current" music - are probably most affected. I'd say the majority of music still was accessible. Often you would have another video upload of the same song accessible when one was blocked.

Which reminds me of a different issue, is it possible that Youtube, and possibly other video portals too, deliberately ever so slightly messes up the sound of music videos? Maybe to ensure there still is an incentive to buy? I can't really tell for sure, but a lot of music to me sounds a little worse than I would have expected.

Actually I'm with the GP: A large number of videos I cared about were unwatchable - and the reason was usually low key background music from say an uploaded twitch stream.

In other words: I don't (usually, it's quite rare) go to YT for music and still I really believe that this change improves my usage.

I don't bother with proxy solutions, so this change is most welcome to me.

  > I don't bother with proxy solutions

Note that you didn't really have to do anything but install a Chrome extension. If you left it turned on it would detect when a video was blocked and reload the page through some proxy. Pretty low effort overall. Otherwise I would not have done it myself, the only videos I ever needed it for were pure music videos, which I can easily live without if it's even slightly inconvenient to see them.

And remember the comment I replied to said "YT was completely unusable in Germany", which is definitely not true no matter how any one individual person might have been affected. It's one thing to speak about ones own experiences, but YT wasn't "unusable in Germany".

Sure, "completely unusable" is similar to the "literally unplayable" gaming meme: Way over the top. I tried to point out that our experience (yours, mine) differ and mine was repeatedly/often disturbed due to random GEMA claims, while not even looking for music.

(I don't use Chrome, but I assume there'd be a Firefox extension. Then again, I remember that there used to be a ~shady~ extension for exactly this YT issue and I just never felt good about installing an extension for my browser for this narrow a use case.)

I agree about the extensions in general. I had a very strange issue that Google kept asking me for confirmation that I'm not a robot. I initially suspected my aging router had been captured, so I replaced it. But only when I removed the BTTV (Better Twitch TV) extension did it stop. I repeated the experiment, one or two days after reinstalling it I was again blocked by Google, and the block again disappeared very shortly after removing it a second time. That extension actually loads most of its code from a server, which they even write about in their README - I have no idea how this is allowed in the Chrome store.

This is why I had the Youtube-proxy extension disabled, and only enabled briefly for when I needed it for a specific video. Incidentally, today in the headlines: WOT - Web Of Trust - an extension used by millions on several browsers, has sold all browsing data of all their users to 3rd parties. Worst part: According to journalists who purchased the data they were able to actually identify individual users because of the many details that were included.

Why is it a win for most ordinary people that GEMA is so handsomely rewarded for limiting content? It is not a good thing at all, it emboldens them. Who does GEMA think that they are?

You give Netflix as an example, that isn't going to be resolved any time soon following this deal. GEMA shouldn't exist.

In theory ? Same reason as copyright. The idea behind GEMA is to create a centralized organization for enforcing copyright. Instead of owing royalties to U2 for playing their songs in a cafe, you'd owe them to GEMA, who'd pay them to U2 according to how often they're played (I believe radio playlists are used as metrics to determine payouts). Secondly, any hard drive or other "blank recording media", such as usb sticks has a 10% surtax most of which goes to GEMA.

Funny little details that suck about GEMA:

1) assumption of guilt. You have an event, even some birthday parties, you have to prove, by submitting playlists (paying "handling fees" for the privilege) and they may check, also not free to you.

2) one-sided, no government oversight on what is effectively an extra tax

3) they have pissed off just about everyone, including their beneficiaries

4) they're very heavy-handed

In practice ? They're just leeches, they don't pay significant amounts to anyone despite getting quite a bit of money in. Even extremely famous artists that were famous for decades get something like a normal pay from the playing of their songs. Everybody hates them, their "customers" (ie. those who play music) and their beneficiaries.

GEMA claims their costs are 15% of what is paid in. In practice it certainly looks to me like it's more like 80%.

So it really just creates another abusive government monopoly with cushy jobs for a few government favored people. Additionally it creates a few (tiny) free (for the government) subsidies using a privately-levied tax, given to "cultural" institutions like orchestras and other such things nobody goes to anymore. Not enough to prevent them from dying, so even they are not happy.

As I mentioned in another thread, I feel that they alongside GEZ, just are a kind of government sponsored mafia kind of thing.

Specially if I believe the stories how their employees sometimes coerce people to pay.

We need a competitor to get rid of the GEMA assumption.

(I am not familiar with the GEMA business) „...very angry that GEMA succeeded...“ Why? Don't they collect money for the artists (I guess after taking their cut)? Which seems very hard to do as an individual artist...and very easy if you have a massive artist-base.

You are completely right in your assumption. GEMA sole function is to collect royalties for songwriters -- not performing artists, just the writers -- and secondary right holders (like publishers) and distribute it to them. They are in fact a non-profit. Every penny they make, they have to distribute to their members (minus operating costs).

German people have a very interesting and uninformed bias against GEMA, which has been fueled by the laughable YT/GEMA dispute over the past years. It is easy to see why: GEMA provides absolutely no service to anyone outside of the few thousand songwriters they represent. YT provides a service to millions, for free, and GEMA disrupts that service. GEMA is slow, old and very, very unsexy. YT is here to make everyone and their mom happy. It's a tough sell.

There might be an uninformed bias for some people. But there is a very well informed one for many others. Just a few examples...

- Gema is a monopoly and has (until now) successfully used it's political power to stay one. The last chairman of the board of directors even boasted that Gema has managed to "avoid useless competition".

- 65% of the money Gema passes on goes to 5% of it's members, the full members. These 3400 full members of Gema are also the ones who elect the people who get a job on the board and the committees. Those then decide how the money Gets distributed. Sounds legit! [1]

- If a band plays their own songs in a concert, and the organizer has to pay 300€ to Gema for this, which then gives 2.80€ back to the band at the end of the year - that's not even the worsts case. [2]

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...

[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...

>they have to distribute to their members (minus operating costs). //

I don't know if it applies here but you can usually fit a quite sizable fortune through that hole there. In a similar way not-for-profit orgs can pay whatever wage they decide, so are operating costs appropriately ~5% mark that the best charities manage or are they higher?

When you say "have to" presumably you mean they're under a legal and enforced obligation. Linking the groups latest accounts here would be interesting I'm sure.

Well, a quick search gave me 380,000€ per year for the chairman of the board of directors in 2011. [1] (Do not be confused by the mention of the "Belgian GEMA" in the title!)

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...

Or maybe they hate GEMA for being a big lobbying organization that enforces laws for which you really have to squish your thinking to justify them:

I for one, hate them because for every type of data storage I buy, I pay some percentage to them, because I COULD use those to store their music on it. I do not listen to music at all (really), so I have to pay a private organization basically a tax for nothing. Remind you that you are not allowed to copy those music by this law, you pay for being able to make a backup of information you possess.

GEMA is widely disliked in Germany, mostly because of it's heavy handed business practices, enabled by historically established political connections and sleaze, and it's internal corruption and unfair distribution of the taken money.

I think best comparison is to RIAA in United States, back in 1995-2008 or so during lawsuit years. They have a tantrum and scorched earth policy.

This was really a ridiculous situation. Sometimes you couldn't see a movie trailer (which is basically an ad) because there was a GEMA song in it, and sometimes you couldn't watch the song video from the musicians official channel because GEMA. I really hope that this will all be opened now that the case is finished.

Maybe they got cold feet because finally a cool alternative to GEMA is emerging: https://www.c3s.cc/ (current status: somewhere in the bureaucratic labyrinth, but slowly making progress)

I still see "This Content is not available in your Country" on many Japanese Youtube Videos (browsing from USA). And even stranger, it only shows that message when browsing from a mobile phone's browser (ex: iPhone Safari). Here's an example of a cat video (there are many more) : https://www.pawpurrazi.com/cat-toilet-paper-sit-roll/

Watch the youtube embed video on that page in a mobile phone.

So what gives? Is Japan also in some dispute?

Also in the USA. That cat video plays on Firefox and Chrome for Android, but if I open the link on my laptop and open the embed in a new tab (because I block external scripts on my laptop), it "contains content from Jukin Media. It is restricted from playback on certain sites." So my guess in this particular case would be that something in Safari prevents YouTube from recognizing that the video is embedded on a site that bought an embed license.

The more general problem with watching Japanese videos from the US is largely due to the fact that many Japanese media companies like to sell exclusive international distribution rights for all of their content, regardless of whether the buyer will actually distribute all of the content, or if the buyer is only going to use it in China or Korea. So they block their videos outside of Japan and we often can't find a version available in the US.

Interesting. This makes sense. So I guess the content owner / "Licensor" is the problem here, and not Youtube. Good to know.

No, Japanese rightsholders just tend to be strict.

Some labels have not accepted the YouTube Red agreements, which means they're unavailable in countries where YouTube Red has been launched (=only the US right now I think) http://www.networkworld.com/article/3014058/mobile-wireless/...

Finally. I hated internet in Germany because of this and the lack of public wifi access points.

ProxFlow (formerly ProxTube) has been around forever, running a bunch of proxy servers as basically a public service. It's widely used in Germany.

We don't need public wifi access points in most European countries because our 3G and 4G connections tend to be quite good, at least in the main cities.

Except 3G and 4G is ridiculously costly if you want a reasonable amount of data without taking on a 2 year contract. I live in Berlin and the Germans I talk to about this usually don't see a problem.

I moved here from the Nordics so you could say I'm spoiled but I think it's reasonable to have near unlimited data so that I can actually watch YouTube/Spotify/Netflix without worrying that it'll make me unreachable on Whatsapp/Messenger when I'm out and about.

Public access points would be great in Berlin (can't say for other cities) for sure, but they'd have to change that stupid law where the owner of a connection (say, a café) is persecuted if one of its visitors do something illegal on their connection.

I have 1 GB per month on a O2 pre-paid card in Germany.

That is a reasonable amount of data for me.

Also that law applies to everyone with an wlan router, not just coffee owners.

> Also that law applies to everyone with an wlan router, not just coffee owners.

Very true. I'm only really thinking about it when I try out a new café that doesn't have WIFI.

I used to have 1GB on Blau. I'm trying desperately to cut all ties and get some money back from them but they're horrible, that's another story though.

In any case I've been paying about 10e for 1GB per month. Yes I can live it for sure, I often don't even go beyond 600Mb per month.

With unlimited data I would use my phone a lot differently though. I'd likely stream Audible Channels if I got the urge or found something interesting while on train, maybe I'd watch something on YT or check out new music.

Because of these expensive limited plans I'm not using my phone a lot. It's both a good thing but also a bit sad I think. I'm very much ranting here, sorry for that.

It's just weird coming from unlimited data that you pay 15e/month for (4G unlimited mind you) to this thing. Friends at home regularly surpass 10Gb per month because they're streaming music constantly. Some even use their phones as the only internet connection they have, skipping landlines entirely!

Not sure I'd come across this particular rights / negotiation case in the past but I'm grateful to get a chance to read this article posted here. Quite useful to stay in the know. I hope all the parties are pretty satisfied with the terms and processes now.

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