[codfrantic]

To Clarify, banning illegal downloading sounds quite logical.

Until now, downloading of copyrighted material such as movies, tv shows and music was allowed for personal use. This apparently has been overruled by an EU court. Quite interested to see what this is going to change....

[cyphax]

I think very little will change. A little background: The Netherlands has for a long time allowed for people to make a copy of media (video, music, but not software), for personal use. This included media you'd borrow from a library, for example, or even your neighbor. To compensate, carriers (optical media, flash memory and the like) are a bit more expensive because an additional fee (of several euros; height depends on the size of the medium more or less) is added to the price of said media. Then, the internet came to be and suddenly you could make a copy easily, but the rules were left unaltered, but the compensation went up in price.

A very important detail of the fact that downloading for personal use (redistributing, e.g. uploading, has always been illegal) was allowed even if the source was "illegal" (e.g. torrents, usenet). The reason for that is that it can be hard to tell whether or not the source you download from is distributing legally or illegally. The above is now no longer OK, apparently, but if you borrow a CD from the library, you can still copy it for personal use just fine. We've kind of reverted to the situation we had before the internet was mainstream.

The reason I think nothing will change is that "distribution" (I use this term loosely to allow a torrent site, for example, to fall in this category for argument's sake) has always been a target, and individuals downloading for personal use never were. The organization tasked with dealing with copyright infringement has stated to keep its arrows pointed at the distributing side of all this, not the individual downloader.

I'd be very very surprised if it's going to be enforced in any way, due to being almost unenforceable.

The media industry STILL has to work on giving the consumer what they want, and seeing as how Netflix and Spotify are good examples of services that are now available here and seem to be doing pretty good, it might be okay.

[Cthulhu_]

I'm pretty sure the 'home copy' law doesn't allow you to copy stuff from the library; these works still fall under copyright law, after all, and each of them has a big disclaimer in the front saying no part of it may be copied.

The 'home copy' law is so you can create copies for your own use of material you bought yourself, as long as you keep it to yourself - things like transferring a CD to your mp3 player.

Similarly, it is (was?) legal to download copyrighted material to your own computer for your own use, if you already owned the material.

There is/was another loophole in the copyright law, which states it's not allowed to distribute copyrighted material. However, this law doesn't state anything about receiving and using copyrighted material; it's the distributor / uploader that's responsible for that. And since, in the case of internet piracy, that uploader is often not under Dutch jurisdiction, it kinda falls on its face.

[cyphax]

> I'm pretty sure the 'home copy' law doesn't allow you to copy stuff from the library

But it does. :)

It is explained here: http://www.iusmentis.com/auteursrecht/nl/thuiskopie/ but it is in Dutch. It states that: - You may make only a few copies but it's unspecified how many that is.

- The copy has to be for personal use

- You may make the copy for someone else, but this is not true for music

- You don't have to own the material you want to copy

- There are some exceptions, namely electronic databases (paper database are allowed), physical structures (no copying other buildings please!) and computer software

[ds9]

The problem with this interpretation is that in the vast majority of cases, one cannot know whether downloading is authorized or not.

Virtually every video, audio or text file of works created in the past century, more or less, is copyrighted. That alone is not the relevant criterion. The criterion of infringement is whether the particular action is authorized by the copyright holder. But this, no one can routinely know in the course of internet activities.

There is no central or public database of works that would reveal even who the copyright owner is - and even if there were, it would have to also record the authorization status of everyone in relation to every work.

So you are looking around online and someone is offering a file - if you are subject to lawsuits, fines or whatever other interference for downloading, then in principle it's not safe to even look at a web page. What the new rule amounts to in practice is something like "well if you infer that the web page is intended to be retrieved, you're probably safe, but you can be penalized for guessing incorrectly about music or videos". (Note that movie companies have actually sued youtube/Google over files including some that the movie companies themselves published on youtube.)

It simultaneously keeps everyone continually vulnerable to selective enforcement by private companies (specifically, big copyright accumulators), and casts a chilling effect on the relationship of fans with artists who would like to release works on more liberal terms than Hollywood companies (can you trust a statement on a web page that something is authorized???).

[KhalPanda]

Surely if it was legal to download copyrighted material before, for personal use, then it wasn't... illegal.

So what they've actually done is ban the downloading of copyrighted material, not ban the illegality of downloading copyright material since that's a double-negative.

[pieter_mj]

No, they banned the downloading of copyrighted material from illegal sources. You may still copy and/or download copyrighted material from legal sources for personal use.

The law hasn't changed. It's been clarified by the European court and the Dutch Government follows this interpretation as of now.

[codfrantic]

That's what I was trying to say with 'sounds quite logical'

[prawks]

I'd imagine the companies providing seedboxes in the Netherlands may have a lot of work to do.

[codfrantic]

also usenet providers might be in the scope of BREIN[$] now..

[$]http://www.anti-piracy.nl/english.php