Buma/Stemra: radio portals no longer have to pay

Websites that embed radio streams no longer have to pay a license fee to Buma/Stemra. This is apparent from an e-mail that an owner of an embed site received from Buma/Stemra. Recently, the European Court ruled that it is allowed to link to freely accessible internet content.

Buma/Stemra has withdrawn the licenses for embedding radio streams, also known as the ’embed tax’, the owner of streaming site RadioFM.nl told Webwereld. “In that case, the license will be terminated with effect from January 1, 2014”, according to the e-mail to RadioFM.

Buma/Stemra previously won a lawsuit against the site Nederland.fm, which embeds streams from radio stations. Because it was a new publication, Nederland.fm also had to pay for those streams, even though the radio stations had already done so themselves.

However, halfway through this month, the European Court ruled that linking to copyrighted material that is freely accessible on the Internet cannot constitute copyright infringement. That is why Buma/Stemra has now withdrawn the ’embed tax’. This does not mean that the license fee already paid will be refunded, according to the e-mail to RadioFM.