Freddy Mercury would have been 65

I am most impressed by the video Google have used to head their search page, marking the birthday of Freddy Mercury.

I am less impressed by my inability to access the YouTube video in order to get the embed code. YouKu to the rescue! 

I am beginning to get totally fed up with the intransigence of the German copyright agency GEMA who demand that YouTube block access to about six hundred popular clips. 

"YouTube’s contracts with several European collecting societies expired over a year ago, and most have renegotiated with the Google-owned site. For example, Great Britain’s PRS for Music agreed upon a rate of £0.00085 per streamed track. GEMA, however, is proposing a significantly heftier collection rate of € 0.1278 (£0.11) for every song up to five minutes, and more for longer tracks and those with ads. Up till now the German collecting society has refused to budge on its requirements for a new deal with YouTube. GEMA wants YouTube to account for YouTube’s revenue growth by demanding shares of advertising revenue."

What makes this all the more absurd is that GEMA subsequently shares out the monies they have collected to all their members (and I am one) regardless of whether any of their work is available via YouTube or not.

Okay, just to do a but of nose-thumbing, the clip embedded below was shot in 1996, I wrote the lyrics of the song. And yet GEMA have not blocked the video? Are my rights being ignored? Huh?