Loss of Privacy

Germany’s music licensing agency, GEMA, has decided that preschools can no longer teach songs and have children perform them without paying a licensing fee for sheet music under a new tightening of copyright laws.

The new rules came into power at the beginning of this year, but have only recently drawn attention as daycare centers have received letters reminding them that they need to sign contracts with GEMA before distributing sheet music to children to sing.

GEMA said that the need for licenses would not have any effect on singing in kindergartens.
“It doesn’t cost anything to sing in kindergartens,” said Peter Hempel. “If a school does not make any copies of music, then of course they don’t need to pay anything.”

This is absolutely ridiculous. The schools aren’t making copies and passing them out to the public. They make a handful of copies so each child has a copy to learn the songs from. Performers are not losing out on any money in this manner.

The copyright rules only concern the rights for modern songs. Songs written by an author who has been dead for over 70 years are automatically in the public domain.

Fees start at 56 euros ($74) for 500 copies of a song, a rate charged annually, not per child.

I predict Germany’s preschools are going to start singing many more traditional songs in the years to come. The German Pirate Party has released a song book in response to the new GEMA rules. It contains only music that is not in copyright. The German Pirate Party also created their own sheet music, which is also not under copyright. It can be freely used and distributed.

While this new law is questionable, it is less intrusive than Belgium, where preschools are charged for playing music to children.

From January.

Speaking a CeBIT, Professor August Wilhelm Scheer made the astonishing claim that one in four Germans would be happy to have an implanted RFID chip in their skin if it meant more convenience for them, particularly waiting times at the grocery store.

As well as foretelling the imminent demise of the CD and DVD, Professor Scheer said that implanting chips into humans was going to become commonplace. “The speed of the development is not going to be reduced this decade,” he told an audience of tech execs and politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Some developments can already be seen. CDs and DVDs are going to disappear as material sources of information. Wallpaper will be replaced by flat screens and many of us will have chips implanted beneath our skin by the end of next decade.

Rather than being based on pure speculation, Scheer said that his organistion BITKOM had actually conducted research which had shown that a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted if it meant they could access services more easily.

“We just carried out a survey and one out of four people are happy to have a chip planted under their skin for very trivial uses for example to pass gates more quickly at a discotheque for example and to be able to pay for things more quickly in the supermarket,” said Scheer. “The wilingness of the population to accept our technology is certainly given.”

The results of that survey are on their website [pdf] . If you look closer at Mr. Scheer’s statistics, 72% do not want an RFID implant.

Stats are hard to figure out, especially when it’s been reported that 1 in 7 Germans want the Berlin Wall back because the country was better off when it was split.

A link from Bruce Schneier’s website to another link to YouTube, I discovered this video. I don’t speak German, however, if you watch closely the scanner picked out the cell phone and Swiss Army knife, but it missed all the components needed to make a bomb.

The former head of the West German Military Intelligence has issued a book revealing secret details of a 1949 US-German treaty, alleging America and its allies have been deliberately suppressing the nation’s sovereignty.