They petitioned the government for copyright to exist for a hundred years and more, and now they don’t want to pay people for their own likeness and copyright for their Own works.
Funny how that double edged sword works.
That’s how it has always been, though. Corporations have a long history of stealing from the public and just having to say “oops, sorry” (if that) for the most part when they’re caught misusing things in respect to copyright.
Like the “you wouldn’t download a car” ads from the early 2000’s, whose reign ended when it came out that the music used for the videos was unlicensed and illegally used.
Back in 2006, Buma/Stemra approached a Dutch musician, Melchior Reitveldt, to write some music for an anti-piracy ad, with the strict proviso that this music would be played only and exclusively at a local film festival. Mr. Reitveldt wrote the music, it was played, he got paid and all was well.
But then, in 2007, he bought a Harry Potter DVD and to his surprise, there was his music in the anti-piracy ad at the beginning. His composition had been taken and used without his permission. In fact, it had been illegally used on dozens of movie DVDs, both in Holland and overseas. You probably have one at home right now.
So Mr. Reitveldt went to the Buma/Stemra music royalty collection agency to clear up this misunderstanding, and ran into a brick wall. Nothing happened for a long time, and then pathetically small refunds were offered, and then they weren’t paid in full, and the delaying tactics went on and on.
Finally, in 2011, about half a decade after the original theft of his music, there was a kind of a breakthrough. Supposedly, one of the directors of Buma/Stemra music royalty collection agency, Mr Jochem Gerrits, spoke to him personally, offering to speed things up. Everything would proceed nicely, if the musician, Mr. Reitveldt, would simply sell the contested piece of music to him, Mr Gerrits. The payout would be one million Euros, and Mr Gerrits would keep one third for all his trouble and hard work, and the musician, Mr. Reitveldt, would keep two thirds.
It’s a bit like having somebody steal your property, you report it to the police, and after a lot a dilly-dallying, a senior police officer approaches you offering to give two-thirds of your property back to you, if you give them one third.
Luckily, the musician recorded the conversation. The crooked director of the Buma/Stemra music royalty collection agency had to resign. In June 2012, the court ordered Buma/Stemra to repay the money.
Other sources report on how much the company was fined and how much the court ordered them to pay, six years after the initial incident.
TorrentFreak reports that the Amsterdam District Court fined Buma/Stemra €20,000 (£15,700) and ordered the agency to pay Rietveldt all of the money they owed him – €164,974 (£130,000).
This judgement follows years of legal wranglings. In early 2012, Stemra offered Rietveldt a settlement of €60,000 (£47,000), but Rietveldt sued for the aforementioned larger amount. In June, the agency offered an additional €31,000 (£24,000), but the District Court has ruled that they need to pay the full amount requested by Rietveldt.
The case is made even murkier by the attempts in 2011 by Suma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits to persuade the composer to sign over the rights of his song to his own record label – High Fashion Music. Gerrits allegedly claimed to be able to help the musician retrieve his royalities in return for representing the song on his own label, thus entitling him to 33 percent of Rietveldt’s royalties.
A news organisation in the Netherlands, PowNews, claimed that this was evidence of corruption and Gerrits later resigned, but then sued the news organisation for defamation.
This is what copyright pays for, it pays for corrupt fucking charlatans who get caught in the act and then have the audacity to sue someone for defamation because they were rightly called out as the fucking crooks they are.
Also, notice the criminally small fine they were required to pay, compared to how much people who pirated music were being sued for in the US during the same period.
It’s always been okay for businesses to do it to regular people, because they have oodles of money to pay teams of lawyers to ream your ass for years and make you spend a mint to try to get what was supposed to be legally yours to begin with.
They’re just saying the quiet part out loud now because they’re too stupid to realize how many people that will wildly piss off.
This reminds me of Tom Scott’s great video on copyright.
tl;dr: copyright law only exists as far as you can afford to pay for lawyers to enforce it. Without major government assistance to individuals and small organizations, the big companies will always win in the current system.
I really want to tell you that you’re wrong, and then I remember that most of Disney’s works are entirely ripoffs of other stories. There’s a whole cracked article on it I think.
But I really want you to be wrong.
I only hope they succeed!
