A body representing German musicians found itself accused of Scrooge-like meanness yesterday after pressing kindergartens to pay up for singing songs that are protected by copyright.

The Gema, the German musical copyright monitoring body, has written to 36,000 of the nursery schools telling them they have to fork out to photocopy song texts and to keep a proper record of which ones are sung.

Kindergartens and MPs were incensed, with the mass-circulation Bild daily calling the move “bureaucratic madness”.

A spokesman for the Paritaetischer Wohlfahrtsverband Hamburg, an association representing 280 kindergartens, told the Tagesspiegel daily that the Gema’s demand was “petty, over the top and utterly inappropriate”.

Sybille Laurischk, family affairs committee head in the federal Parliament, told Bild that kindergartens should be exempt, while Heiko Mass, head of the Social Democrats (SPD) in the western state of Saarland, called it a “rip-off”.

Gema spokesman Bettina Mueller defended the demand, telling AFP that the cost was a modest €56 for 500 copies for state-run kindergartens, or €46 for institutions run by the Church.