Every Embed Will Cost You

Germany’s GEMA—the collecting society that manages music performance and reproduction rights, the organization whose name appears in the block screen every time you try to watch a music video from outside the country—has decided that embedding a YouTube video on a blog should cost money. Not making the video. Not hosting it. Embedding it. The act of dropping a link into a post and having a video appear on your page: taxable, billable, a new revenue stream.

The logic, such as it is: after failing to extract a satisfying sum from YouTube directly, GEMA pivoted to extracting it from everyone who links to YouTube. Every blogger, every hobbyist with a WordPress site, every person who dropped a music video into a post years ago and forgot about it—now potentially liable. A prominent German tech blogger summarized the policy process with appropriate exhaustion: experts were invited to hearings, experts arrived, experts were comprehensively ignored. He recalled being greeted at a parliamentary hearing with the observation that it was nice to see the experts back, given that they’d been completely ignored the last several times too. The legislation proceeds anyway.

What’s remarkable isn’t the greed—collecting societies are almost structurally required to be greedy—but the specific texture of the logic. A hyperlink, a pointer to content that lives on someone else’s server, constitutes a form of reproduction that requires a license. You didn’t record it, host it, or profit from it. You pointed at it. Pay up. Welcome to the German internet, where every day delivers its own fresh absurdity and the people responsible for it face no consequences whatsoever.