GEMA Wants Rent on Your Blog Now

You’d think you couldn’t possibly hate GEMA any more than you already do. GEMA’s Germany’s copyright collection society—basically an organization whose entire job is finding new ways to make everyone miserable—and they just proved you could hate them more. Now they want bloggers to pay them money every time they embed a YouTube video. Not YouTube itself, mind you. The blogger. You, for putting the video on your site.

I remember reading about this somewhere, some blogger named Fefe broke it down. GEMA got nowhere with YouTube, so now they want to go after individual bloggers instead. It’s the ultimate fallback strategy when you can’t win the main fight.

There’s definitely an expert hearing happening about this, or about to happen. There always is. Someone’s probably testifying about why this is a genuinely terrible idea, and nothing will come of it—like always. I remember reading about someone at the Bundestag getting welcomed with a joke about how they’d been completely ignored last time, and well, here we are again. That’s the whole system right there.

And that’s the story of German internet culture. Every single day, another layer of bureaucratic absurdity that makes you wonder how anyone gets anything done here.