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A Dutch musicians' rights group has been fined for "stealing" music from a client and using it without permission or paying royalties.

It started in 2006 when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy association Brein asked Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video that was to be shown only at a local film festival. However, in 2007, Rietveldt found out that his music was also being used on a Harry Potter DVD that was being distributed globally without his permission.


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Rietveldt went to his local music royalty collections agency Buma/Stemra (which is one of the participants in Brein) in order to recoup the royalties that he felt he was owed. At the time, Buma/Stemra promised to pay him €15,000 (£11.8k) and find out where exactly his music had been used – on at least 70 different commercial DVDs. However, Rietveldt never received this list and continued to battle with the agency to get hold of it and the royalties he was owed.

TorrentFreak reports that the Amsterdam District Court fined Buma/Stemra €20,000 (£15,700) and ordered the agency to pay Rietveldt all of the money they owed him – €164,974 (£130,000).


This judgement follows years of legal wranglings. In early 2012, Stemra offered Rietveldt a settlement of €60,000 (£47,000), but Rietveldt sued for the aforementioned larger amount. In June, the agency offered an additional €31,000 (£24,000), but the District Court has ruled that they need to pay the full amount requested by Rietveldt.

The case is made even murkier by the attempts in 2011 by Suma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits to persuade the composer to sign over the rights of his song to his own record label – High Fashion Music. Gerrits allegedly claimed to be able to help the musician retrieve his royalities in return for representing the song on his own label, thus entitling him to 33 percent of Rietveldt's royalties.

A news organisation in the Netherlands, PowNews, claimed that this was evidence of corruption and Gerrits later resigned, but then sued the news organisation for defamation.