Germans can’t see meteorite YouTube videos due to copyright dispute

[jsr]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/21/german-youtube-dispute

Germans can’t see meteorite YouTube videos due to copyright dispute
By Cyrus Farivar

Last week, when the world was watching crazy Russian meteorite videos on YouTube, the Germans weren't.

As a result of an ongoing dispute between Google (YouTube's parent company) and GEMA, the primary German performance rights organisation, a number of Russian YouTube videos have been blocked from within Germany. The reason? These videos contain background music playing from a Russian car radio.

This is just the latest example of a ridiculous situation that has developed in Germany. According to a recent study by OpenDataCity, more than 60 percent of the top 1,000 YouTube videos are unavailable in Germany because Google assumes the music rights might be owned by GEMA.

[MADem]

1. Ambient noise is ambient noise--I think that music rights for "playing on the radio" stuff is BS.

Heaven forfend that someone is walking down the street and music from this radio and that boom box reaches the microphone while they are recording their stroll!

[RedCappedBandit]

2. It's ridiculous

Even from where I am in NY, I have had trouble uploading videos with music playing in the background. It's nonsense.