The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).
The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.
Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.
It gets better:
Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.
In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.
So an anti-piracy group doesn’t ask permission or pay a composer to use his music and the group that should be protecting his rights actually has its boardmembers attempt to extort him…
Did you know American Samoa has a national football team? If, like me, you didn’t, you won’t be surprised to learn that it ranks absolutely last on FIFA’s world rankings and regularly does things like lose 31-0 to Australia. Or did, as with the arrival of new Dutch coach Thomas Rongen, they managed to book their first victory ever, against Tonga:
In October they agreed to loan Thomas Rongen, an Ajax-trained disciple of Total Football who had managed four Major League Soccer teams as well as the US Under-20 side for almost 10 years, for the duration of the tournament. The transformation after Rongen’s arrival was, says Brodie, profound. Within a week of the arrival of the “Palagi” – the Samoan word for white off-islanders which translates literally as “cloud-burster” – the improvements in organisation and discipline were extraordinary. Most significantly, though, was the change in mentality his coaching had brought, so much so that when they defeated Tonga 2-1 on Tuesday and drew 1-1 with Cook Islands on Friday there was no complacency – the players were frustrated at not keeping clean sheets.
Rongen has been with the team for less than a month and found the tactical reorganisation easier than the psychological one. “I am steeped in the Dutch football tradition,” he says. “The teachings of Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff and a technical brand of football is my motivation but what I encountered here was the exact opposite. So I had to adapt. I went from an old-style 4-4-2 to a more modern 4-2-3-1 because since it’s obvious that they give away too many goals, I thought four defenders and two holders would help. It’s easier to teach inexperienced players how to defend than to attack but we’ve made great strides in organisation and communication.
Thomas Rongen is not very well known here, having spent most of his playing career after having been trained at Ajax in the various US/American league. He later became a coach, working e.g. at DC United (did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?) and the US national U-21 team. Dutch football coaches in general are very popular for ailing national teams — Guus Hiddink has build his career doing this — and it’s nice to see Rongen do his bit for a national team of a country with a population barely enough for a small town.
Rongen and his coaching is not the only interesting thing about the team though: it must be the only national teams which has an openly transgender person playing:
The other breaker of barriers in the squad is Johnny “Jayiah” Saelua, a fa’afafine, biologically male but identified as a third sex widely accepted in Polynesian culture. She – and she prefers she – is the first transgender player to compete in a World Cup match and has formed a centre-half partnership with the Arizona-based Rawlston Masaniai, who along with other team-mates, calls her “sister”. “There is no discrimination,” she says. “I put aside whether I’m a girl or a boy and just concentrate on playing. I think I add a third dimension to the team, collect my energies and keep the team together, that’s my responsibility as the fa’afafine, the feminine.”
Sepp Blatter has reassured us that racism in football is non-existent, but homophobia is still rampant, with few openly gay players and fewer openly gay players still actively playing, even in supposedly enlightened countries like the Netherlands. And homosexuality is much more accepted (or so it seems) than transgender/genderqueer people still are, so it’s nice to see how matter of fact the American Samoan team is about their team mate’s gender.
According to an article in De Pers, Dutch police intelligence services attempt to recruit minors to serve as informers. In at least some cases, this was even done without their parents knowing. A lawyer quoted in the article spoke of “stasi-like methods”, which sounds about right to me.
In the Netherlands only the socalled CIE or Criminal Intelligence Unit is allowed to use informers, with information gathered through their use not legal to use in criminal prosecutions, though some lawyers do complain that such information does end up in public prosecutor files and is hard to check up on. Rules about the use of minors are non-existent, so the situation seems rife for abuse. Certainly any such approach of a minor should be done with the permission of their parents. Sneaking around behind their backs is just wrong.
A Dutch court has ordered the government to compensate the widows of seven villagers who were summarily executed and a man shot and wounded in a notorious massacre during Indonesia’s bloody battle for independence from colonial rule.
The Hague Civil Court ruled on Wednesday it was “unreasonable” for the government to argue that the widows were not entitled to compensation because the statute of limitations had expired.
According to Indonesian researchers, Dutch troops wiped out almost the entire male population of Rawagede, a village in West Java, two years before the former colony declared independence in 1949.
[...]
The only living witnesses are now in their 80s, and illiterate, after having to fend for themselves following the deaths of their husbands.
“There were dead bodies everywhere, many of which we found in the river after the shooting stopped,” said Cawi, a survivor.
[...]
The court’s judgement paves the way for a case to establish the level of indemnities to be paid to the relatives.
However, Zegveld said its narrow focus on widows of massacre victims means it is unclear whether it will expose the Dutch state to a flood of compensation claims from other relatives of people killed during the Dutch fight to retain control over the Dutch East Indies, which became Indonesia in 1949.
Authorities in the Netherlands say 150 people died while a victims’ association claims 431 lost their lives during an operation to root out a suspected independence fighter hiding in the village, known today as Balongsari.
Every western colonial power has skeletons like this in its closet and would rather they stay there. Yet I can’t help that the Dutch are particularly good at only remembering the history they want to remember. While World War II, in which the Netherlands was a victim of German and Japanese aggression is now an integral part of the Dutch self image, the dirty colonial wars that took place in Indonesia almost from the moment the Japanese had left have been largely erased from our collective memory. In fact, in some respect WWII offers cover for what we did in Indonesia afterwards. It’s only now, when many of the people directly involved (including the victims) are dead that we’re finally getting some recognition of what we did there. We were outraged at what Bosnian Serbs did in Srebrenica and justifiably so, but this means that we should recognise our own atrocities as well.
Last Wednesday it was exactly 100 years ago that Anthony Fokker flew his first self build aircraft, De Spin or Spider around the St. Bavo church. A modest start, but a few years later Fokker would be the scourge of the Allied fighter pilots in World War I, the first to find out how to synchronise a machinegun with the engine to enable it to shoot through the propellor in the Fokker Eindecker. A slew of other fighter planes followed, including the famous triple decker Fokker Dr. I as used by the Red Baron.
After World War I Fokker would become one of the biggest manufacturers of civil airplanes, leading the way for companies like Boeing or Douglas who’d ultimately take over. The Fokker Trimotor, as used by Richard Byrd to fly over the North Pole, is probably the best known. Fokkers were often used in record attempts, including various races from Europe to Asia. On the military side of things, Fokker had modest successes building aircraft for the Dutch airforce, as well as various other European forces. The DXXI’s equiping the Finnish Airforce in the Winter War against the Soviet Union did the best out of all Fokker fighters, gaining impressive victories over planes both superior in number and capabilities…
Postwar Fokker was specialised in providing intermediate range transport planes and airliners, the turboprop F27 Friendship and jet powered F28 Fellowship, both very succesfull, followed a few decades later by the F50 and F100 respectively. However, too small to survive on its own and unlucky in having been taken over by DASA/Daimler Benz, Fokker declared bankrupcy in 1996. There are still quite a few Fokker planes flying however and plans to start production again and it all started with those three rounds around the church in Haarlem by Anthony Fokker in his Spin one hundred years ago.
The tribute Jack Layton got, with hundreds of people chalking down enough messages of support and remembrance to cover a whole square, is not something that I’ll ever suspect to see for a Dutch politician. There are no Jack Laytons in Holland, nobody on the left with the charisma and honesty to inspire such outbursts of solidarity. The closest who had was Jan Marijnissen, but he retired from active politics a few years ago. Instead we mostly seem to generate third rate Blair clones, media trained non-entities with no soul and no ideology fully bought into capitalist realism.
