[jillesvangurp]

The laws differ per country, which makes this super complicated. One of the complexities is that you cannot actually opt out of copyright in many countries and semi private institutions exist that by default will start demanding fees for other people's works based on vague notion of them being the designated organization to do so. The legalities around this are super complicated but it boils down to private institutions having the right to charge fees for copyrighted work by default.

In Germany, this organization is called Gema and they send takedown notices and demand to be payed for work to which they do not own the copyright which they then distribute among their members. This happens even when this goes against the will of the legal copyright holder and you get absolutely nothing unless you are member. Becoming a member is very long process and is not free. So you have to pay to eventually get the right to get payed. It is effectively the bigger Gema members that grab most of the cash that it collects.

Effectively organizations like Gema are legalized extortion schemes. They get to play judge, prosecutor, and police. Real judges routinely and blindly rule in their favor. Lawmakers are lobbied into submission, etc. Wikipedia has a nice overview of how artists are getting ripped off, misc fraudulent schemes involving Gema, and how money rolls to their exclusive members rather than the artists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization).

What happened in this case is that the recordings are in the Gema database which parties like Youtube are required to use to check for potential violations. Of course Gema has no interest whatsoever to prune this database of stuff that shouldn't be there (like public domain stuff) and good luck convincing them to remove stuff from that db. More entries basically means more money for them and the burden is on the payer to prove otherwise. Their strategy is to make this as hard and tedious as possible so they can maximize their profits.

[tauntz]

The same is true in Estonia. Legally any artist can form an organization that is entitled to collect royalties for other artist's work. In practice there is only one such organization (Eesti Autorite Ühing) because nobody bothers to set up their own shop.. and if you're an artist and NOT a member of EAÜ they'll still happily collect money for your work and distribute it amongst their own members and own salaries/real estate etc.

It's absurd.