Collecting society Buma/Stemra is after Dutch bloggers now. Starting in 2010 you must cough up 130 euro for every six music videos you embed in your web page, according to Madbello (Dutch).

Buma/Stemra is a copyright collecting society for composers. It makes use of a feature of Dutch copyright law that says that negotiating licenses and royalties is too cumbersome for some forms of creative works, and that therefore collecting societies can be set up that charge bulk rates and pass on the money to the creators.

IT law specialists Arnoud Engelfriet and Kamiel Koelman are quick to dismiss B/S’ claims at Tweakers.net (Dutch). Both point out that embedding content on your web page is not necessarily a new publication of that content, and therefore B/S cannot charge money for it.

Dutch copyright law makes a distinction between the act of copying and the act of publishing. A famous lawsuit that highlights the difference between the two, and that went all the way to the Dutch High Council is Poortvliet vs. Hovener (Dutch, PDF). Hovener was a publisher who had an agreement to sell 13 reproductions of Poortvliet’s paintings as part of a calendar. Although Hovener did print the calendar, they then cut out the reproductions and sold them separately, pasted on cardboard and presumably at a much higher price. No copying took place, yet it was considered a new form of publication, and therefore infringement.

Engelfriet’s and Koelman’s reasoning are in my opinion unconvincing, but even more so I think B/S rates are through the roof. A rate of 13 cents per embedded video seems much more reasonable considering that videos embedded in blogs (with the rare exception perhaps for blogs where people come to listen to the music) only work to expose an audience to the embedded works.

UPDATE: Sign the petition: bumablog

Four years ago I wrote a piece for the Teleread blog called “Consumers won’t (multi)play.” It told about how telecom providers had lined up all these great packages that combined television, internet access, and telephony. No more hassle with double or triple contracts and bills, just one easy, clean, simple package from a single provider. And the consumer wouldn’t have it, for reasons that remained unclear.

Well, it appears that consumers have finally started to make the move towards a single bill, and I have been caught up in the drift. My internet access provider of many years sent me a rather threatening letter, telling me to get with the program or else… The situation there has been rather more convoluted than elsewhere. My provider offered ADSL before the phone company did (former monopolist KPN), and as a result its customers had to have a contract both with the internet provider, and the phone company (which provided the physical lines).

Later the provider somehow acquired the possibility to offer ADSL without forcing the customer to tango with KPN (I don’t know why, I presume this has to do with some sort of liberalisation of the phone lines), and now it understandably wants to move all its customers that couldn’t be arsed to go the single bill route. So this is the sugar with which they are trying to coax us: “If you don’t move, we’ll raise the price of your subscription.” Naturally, I have been checking out the competition.

Oddly enough, the competition doesn’t seem to be too eager to take me on as a new customer.

UPC offers a handy looking tool to select your package with a great promise: they’ll pay for the cheapest of the three services. But you don’t even have to click around to realize that it’s pretty much the price of the internet service you choose that determines the final cost. Still, you have to choose all the premium deluxe services with all the bells and whistles and free champagne and hookers for a year to get at a price that’s substantially higher than what you would pay at the competition. Wait, there’s some dirt on the screen. Hm, I cannot get it off. Would it be …? Yes, it’s the tiny print that informs of all the extra costs that add 50% to your bills for many moons to come.

All this dancing around the do to hide the true costs.

KPN, that good old phone company, also offers triple play, and they also dance around. They’ve got a couple of special offers lined up right now that make their Basic and Premium package look much better than their Lite package. Well, for the first three months that is. Again, what’s with the deception? Why not give everybody the premium service for three months, and the choice to switch back for free after that?

Telegraaf reports (Dutch) that a change in the Telecommunications law last Wednesday no longer allows contracts to be silently renewed without the customer’s explicit consent, and predicts this change is going to cause a price war in the telecom world. Price comparison whizz-kid Ben Woldring tells the paper consumers can save hundreds of euros a year. So far, I have not noticed any participant who seems to take this war seriously.

Illustration: UPC’s two-out-of-three picker always yields pretty much the same price depending on the internet component you choose.

Illustration: If KPN’s premium packages are cheaper than their Lite package, why do they offer the latter at all?

The two fat guys in the picture are both me at a client’s where the photographer,
Michele Boccamazzo, is working as a Web 2.0 guru. He has started a Flickr pool where all can play, so please don’t let me hold the world hostage for One Million Dollars all by myself!. [Insert obligatory "Muhahaha!" here.]

A quarter of the Dutch goes onto the Internet right after waking up in the morning, even before going to the toilet or drinking coffee. (Coffee is the other national addiction.) A study from KPN also shows that 8% of the Dutch consider a day without Internet wasted, says Webwereld. Some 58% of the Dutch even feel a sense of panic coming up after two days offline.

Me, I’ve got one of them old-fashioned steam powered computers that takes a minute or so to start up, so that’s the ideal pee and coffee break. And at the end of the day…

Photo by E-magic, some rights reserved.

A quick technology lesson for the easily intimidated: an Internet connection speed of 1 gigabit per second translates to a single high definition movie off the internet onto your PC in a minute. In theory.

A recent study shows that the Netherlands is the country with third best broadband Internet connection, after Japan and Sweden.

Jealous cries were heard from across the globe, bemoaning the lack of local governments’ willingness to innovate, but the position of the Netherlands has probably less to do with the innovative nature of its citizens and more with the way the country urbanised during the industrial revolution. Many railroads not just connecting cities but cutting through right to the city centres makes it easy to lay cables, especially if this network of rails is already owned by the government.

Meanwhile, a company called Draka has developed fibernet connectors for houseboat owners, so that they too may be connected to the Citynet initiative which aims to hook up almost all of Amsterdam to a 1 gigabyte per second fiber optics network before 2010. Shown here is Olivier Ax in front of his houseboat. So what do these owners of the first fiber optic connections do with all that speed? Whispers around the Internet say they first throttle it to 20 megabit per second, because the faster subscriptions are too expensive.

Photo: Draka. Also via Toby Sterling.

Amsterdam based distributed band promoter Sellaband are partnering with US online book and music sellers Amazon, Tech Crunch reported this week. Sellaband works by letting fans invest 10 USD in a band of their liking. The fans can decide which music they like by downloading it for free. Once 5,000 fans have paid their tenner, Sellaband uses that money to record and promote a professional studio album.

So far 12 bands have reached the 50,000 dollar amount required for a recording. As long as a band does not reach the threshold, the fan (called Believer in Sellaband jargon) can still withdraw the money or invest it in a different band.

According to The Next Web the announced cooperation will include Amazon spamming its own paying customers with Sellaband promotions—did I just read that right? Also, Amazon’s top 50 reviewers will receive free review copies of Sellaband’s albums.

Photo: Sellaband’s Pim Betist at this year’s Hyves party. Source: Thenextweb.org.

Justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin has actually said he wants to create a law which would make using the Internet under an assumed name illegal. His goal? To catch pedophiles. “Security starts with prevention”, Hirsch Ballin said on TV. Apparently, more and more nasty grown-ups in chatboxes manage to gain the trust of children to either get them to take their clothes off or get their phone numbers.

Sure, we get the idea that there are predators on the Internet, but, hey there, no more nicknames or privacy? No more avatars? No more confidentiality? How ignorant of the Internet are you? You were still OK when you were working on making sex with animals illegal.

You now remind me of this rich Canadian businessman in the publishing industry who said he’d buy the Internet to counter the competition.

(Link: fok.nl)

The 1,400 or so residents of the wee village of Knegsel in the province of North Brabant are the first in the Netherlands to get to use a new wireless Internet service via Wimax. Internet company Casema expects much from the possible successor of UMTS. It is 13 times as fast and is perfect for areas where residents are spread thin. In and around Knegsel there are three antennas, which provide wireless broadband Internet over distances of up to 25 kilometres.

(Link: Omroep Brabant)

The Dutch never really warmed to the idea of the credit card, and generally consider it unsafe for online transactions. The new kid on the block, the iDeal system, is rapidly gaining ground, according to the organisation controlling several popular payment methods for the major Dutch banks, Currence, who also run the iDeal system (press release in Dutch). It works like this: at the check-out of an online store, a customer clicks on the iDeal logo, and gets the electronic banking interface of their own bank. In this interface, the required sum is transfered immediately to the shop keeper.

iDeal has shot up from being used for 1% of all online payments in its first year, 2005, to 15% in 2006. Paying by credit card has dropped in popularity from 19% to 13%. Of all Dutch online shoppers, 73% consider iDeal to be a safe system, whereas only 32% think the same of credit cards.

According to ZDnet (Dutch), using acceptgiros (deposit transfer cards) and a bank’s online banking system directly are the most popular forms of payment.

(Image source: Lotus Head.)