Kaiser Soze's Blog

War on Embedding

It has been all over  the news; the Dutch news, at least: you have to pay to embed video in your website.

Righto……..

The BUMA/STEMRA (abbreviated BS, which is by coincidence also the abbreviation for bullshit) announced some new rules yesterday during their press conference for embedding videos from online media streamer sites (youtube, dailymotion, whatever). starting from 2010, EVERYBODY must pay 30 euros per year for EVERY clip that you embed from youtube; if the embedded video falls under the copyright list of bullshit/stemshit (to be known: 17k musicus in the Netherlands and 1,2 mil worldwide –source: SP!TS).

Here’s a screenshot of today’s SP!TS Newspaper where this news is covered.

The idea is that the BS will (if not already) develop a script/robot/crawler to go, multiply and overpopulate the internet with one mission: to index where on internet (copyrighted) videos are being embedded. Those bots will call home. For those who doesn’t have the permission (= did not pay) to embed the videos, are getting a warning letter to take off the embedded clip. If not? they will get the invoice (the Joel Tannenbaum-RIAA story is a similar story — go google).

This guy from twitter (@coenjacobs) developed the Block Buma Crawler WordPress plugin, and I quote:

“This plugin is capable of keeping computers outside of your WordPress installation, that are blacklisted via this plugin. You can download the Block Buma Crawler plugin right now, version 0.1 is available. Drop the folder that’s inside the download in your /wp-content/plugins/-folder, activate the plugin and enjoy!”

–source: http://coenjacobs.net/blog/steps-blocking-buma-crawlers-wordpress

Furthermore…

Alongside with @coenjacobs, @madbello covering a good tutorial to block BS’s IP address before they can crawl your site. Read the steps in his blog: http://madbello.nl/?p=6997 (in Dutch). The red lines is the following: block the IP belongs to BS by using .htaccess file in your website. If you are using wordpress and not sure what to do, you would be way better off using WP-Ban plugin.

From the comments in madbello’s blog, the suggested IP range is 213.208.242.160 – 213.208.242.167  (.160 and .167 are included!)

UPDATE – THE WAR HAS ENDED AND WE HAVE PREVAILED!!!

I must admit I was a bit late with this story as it has been hot news here in the Netherlands for a few days now. But, not nearly an hour after publishing this article BUMA/STEMRA has thrown in their towel and risen the white flag. They have stopped all active searches on embedded music and will not continue their hunt untill further notice. (Official statement / translation)Since the dutch government has also spoken against BUMA/STEMRA tactics we probably won’t hear from them on this subject for a while. Bye Bye zwaai zwaai!

(+2 kudos, 2 votes)  Loading ...