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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. |
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.