So far so good, everyone is entitled to be paid for their work.

However they are quite aggressive collecting those royalties, to the point that there are royalty free song books for the children on primary schools, for them to avoid paying GEMA.

Since we are approaching Christmas, several typical Christmas markets did had another set of songs going around, a couple of years ago as protest.

So coming back to YouTube, if there is something on a video that might trigger GEMA to act upon, Google just triggers "Sorry this video isn't available in your country".

It was much worse a couple of years ago, when Google refused to pay any kind of royalty to GEMA and just blocked everything, they have kind of settled now, but it still comes up occasionally.