Schonhose

Seems justice has prevailed. Buma/Stemra has decided not to go through with the collection of money for embedded content from YouTube.

Good riddance!

Most of my international readers might just wonder who or what Buma/Stemra is. Well, let me clarify this before continuing on this story.

There are people who make music although you’ll never hear them make a sound: they are called music authors. Their efforts precede the successes of the artists who perform their works. The music that we enjoy is their intellectual property. Just like other authors, they have the right to remuneration when their works are played, sung or recorded. Buma/Stemra takes care of these matters.

Source

Yesterday information about the new 2010 rates for using music was posted on their site (PDF here, in Dutch only). One of the new things is that blog owners (either commercial of hobbyists like me) have to pay for using Youtube video’s containing music on their blogs.

That is right. Every blog owner (and I do suspect social networking sites like Hyves as well) has to pay an yearly amount of 130 euro to be allowed 6 youtube clips with music on their sites. First off, this raises some interesting questions.

1. What if I have posted a video in 2002, when it was perfectly legal, and this post is still readable in the archives. Do I still need to pay for this?
2. What if I don’t actually post a video but merely a link to youtube. Do I still need to pay?
3. Lets assume for a second this is only valid for videos posted after January, 1st 2010. Say I pay 130 euro for a year and upload 6 videos. What happens in 2011? Do I have to pay twice the amount so I can have 6 more in 2011 as well?
4. What about Hyves, who is responsible? The servers are in the Netherlands, making them subjected to Dutch law. But the question is are the people who own the profile page responsible for the content or is that the responsibility of Hyves?

Anyway, everyone who has youtube vids on their page with hosting in the Netherlands will probably receive a letter first. This letter will gives us a choice: either take it down or pay up. Imagine the cost involved for sending all those letters…. I’m sure this is much higher than the revenues from people who actually decide to pay.

As of today it is forbidden to send out unsolicited emails, sms or faxes to not only individuals but also to companies. Over the last few weeks I have received numerous emails from companies detailing the new law and to confirm I still wanted their email.

Needless to say I opted out on most of them, finally my inbox will be a lot cleaner.

While working on the Googlemaps addon I thought it would be useful to re-install Google Earth. Last time I removed it from my computer due to the amount of space it took on my C: drive, which is rather small. I was rather hopeful Google would provide an easy way to change the location of the cache to another drive.

Well, turns out I was wrong. But there is a way to do it, but it requires two hacks in the Windows Registry. The keys you need to change, as well as the location are displayed below:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Earth Plus]
“CachePath”=”F:\\Google Earth Cache”
“KMLPath”=”F:\\Google Earth Cache”

As you can see I moved the Google Earth Cache from the C: to my F: drive which has lots of space left. I wonder when Google will implement an easy way in the options panel of Google Earth. In the meantime this hack will work. Remember to make a copy of your registry to be on the safe side.

The site hasn’t seen much updates lately, but as usual there is a good reason for that. I’ve been busy working on several projects. Inquisitive readers might ask what those projects are. Well, let me reveal at least some of them.

One of the projects I’m working on is the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Export Plugin,, initially developed by my buddy Jay. As not only the author but also user of both the Googlemap addon and the FTP security addon I needed to modify the Lightroom Export plugin to facilitate both GPS coordinates and the automatic opening and closing of both the image and the thumbnail folders. Currently we have a working copy which I use extensively in testing right now. Did I mention we also managed to squash some bugs while producing cleaner code?

The other project I’m working on is the aforementioned Googlemap addon. Since I began working writing code in a more OOP manner I could see how this approach could seriously limit the duplicate code currently found in the addon. I found a nice Googlemap API Class for PHP and intend to use that as a base to rewrite the addon yet again. All features of the (unpublished) third version will be retained, but it will be lean and fast thanks to the use of OOP practices.

Last but not least I’m also working on the new version of Pixelpost. Recently we added two more plugins dealing with both tags and categories. While testing and writing new things resumes we’re building the next-generation photoblog with a solid codebase.