Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

Last week the BUMA - a company that collects money and pays musicians for their airplay - started sending Dutch non-profit blogs a notion (in Dutch) that they were violating BUMA-rules because they embedded YouTube videos. Blogs are re-broadcasting the material (even through an embed) and thus they have to pay a license fee for embedding material. The same way a radio station or a venue does.

It doesn’t matter if the artist himself put his material online for embedding and sharing, since he doesn’t control the rights. Obviously BUMA doesn’t care about the fan. They don’t even specify what information is placed ‘illegal’, which artists are connected and which aren’t. They just want to sell licenses to small groups of fans and non-profit blogs.

After some buzz was generated around it in Dutch online media BUMA responded by saying it was a ‘premature response’. Case closed, for now.

Are we all broadcasters in a distributed environment?
It’s an interesting way of thinking, since the near future of the web will mostly be about sending/broadcasting, aggregating and social networks. Our presence online often exists by re-distrubuting content. Today’s website is more often a collection of data from other places. A manually aggregated hub of information.

Are you a broadcaster when you write something on your Facebook, collect links in a public del.icio.us and share your Netvibes as a public universe? Are you as a blogger a broadcaster? Everyone sharing something (photos, text, thoughts) online is broadcasting in the traditional meaning of the word. Semantics and laws never worked out very well.

Should we regard this as traditional broadcasting? I don’t think so. It’s freedom of expression. It’s sharing the things we like. We’re not uploading or adding illegal material we’re just creating our online identity by embedding and linking. Media represents us.

When are you a broadcaster on the web? Once you make money? Or when your audience reaches a substantial level. Is this blog a broadcasting? Or is it a personal outlet.

I think there is no such thing as an online broadcaster, since everyone is broadcasting and publishing. You can’t ask people to pay for this, like you don’t ask people to pay when they whistle your song in the street. Be happy with the publicity.

If you are an artist and connected to these kind of companies. I’m sure you need or like the money they collect and you deserve it all. At the same time they are taking away bits of your freedom. Think about what the effect is when you give up certain rights and alert those companies about the effect. Technology and culture often change much faster than the people looking backwards to decide what the future should look like.

Here’s a release by NEST, you can download this album for free because it is released into the public domain. It’s also beautiful and needs as much attention as it can get, because I really would like to see them performing live someday.

Nest is the collaborative project of Otto Totland (Deaf Center / Type Records) and Huw Roberts (Serein). The two started working together after forging a strong friendship as former members of the Miasmah label. This self-titled EP is their first work publicly released, so it is a great honour that we are able to offer it to you here.

Both pianists, there is little wonder that after exploring a plethora of musical styles, the two find themselves most at home writing traditionally structured pieces, with the ivories a major element throughout. The EP demonstrates clearly the innate ability the two have for song writing, borrowing from the world of film soundtracks and contemporary classical composers to craft delicate instrumental compositions.

Alongside their favoured instrument can be variously heard the plucked strings of the Welsh harp, violins, woodwind instruments, field recordings, percussion and a heady dose of mind wobbling effects. From the time Nest began writing together, one purpose was clear; to produce beautiful music free of pretense, and they do it exceptionally well.

Photo: spring is early on Flickr All my photos on Flickr are under a Creative Commons license, this means that some rights are reserved instead of all. You are free to use my photos for anything you like, although if you would like to use it for a commercial project you just have to ask me.