Music Ally

German collecting society GEMA has emerged victorious from its court battle against file-hosting service Rapidshare, with the court ruling that Rapidshare is responsible for ensuring that a list of 5,000 copyrighted music tracks aren”t made available on its site for download again.

“This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks,” says a statement from GEMA. The court also ruled that Rapidshare’s existing precautions to prevent illegal sharing of music files were not sufficient. Rapidshare has responded by suggesting that the courts of appeal are likely to restrict the scope of this decision, though.

“For this reason, we think that it would make more sense to work together to provide music fans with the right services at the right price and to open up a new source of income for music-markets on the internet,” says Rapidshare COO Bobby Chang.

Google has announced that it’s pulling music videos from the German YouTube site, following the expiry of its licensing deal with local collecting society GEMA. And the web giant is so angry about the rates it claims GEMA wants to charge, it’s made them public.

Specifically, Google’s Patrick Walker tells Der Spiegel that “It’s unprecedented in the history of music video streaming”, saying that while PRS for Music charges £0.0022 per stream in the UK, GEMA’s on-demand music rate is €0.12 (£0.11) for every song up to five minutes, and more for longer tracks or those with ads.

GEMA disagrees, saying it offered YouTube a rate of €0.01 per track, but that Google was unwilling to give it enough transparency in return – chief executive Harald Heker describes it as a “fundamental clash”. We’ll say. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Musicians Union and the Featured Artists Coalition have both released statements today in support of PRS for Music’s position.

This one will run and run. Meanwhile, labels and artists who were using YouTube for promotion are going elsewhere – witness Kasabian’s use of Vimeo to release the video for their comeback single yesterday.