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Music Media Government The Courts Your Rights Online News

Dutch Portal Cleared of Copyright Infringement 151

Posted by michael from the those-crazy-dutch dept.
CRCates writes "A Dutch court in Haarlem has cleared Techno Design, the operator of Zoekmp3.nl, a music search engine portal, of copyright infringement. The case was launched by BREIN, the Dutch entertainment industry's anti-piracy group. The court ruled that providing links to an MP3 file does not constitute disclosure or publication of contents under Dutch copyright law."
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Dutch Portal Cleared of Copyright Infringement More

Dutch Portal Cleared of Copyright Infringement

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  • Apparently there is an... (Score:5, Funny)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:17PM (#9168666) Journal
    Angel of Haarlem..... U2
    (But don't download it you devils)

  • zeokmp3.nl? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Agilo ( 727098 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:20PM (#9168686) Homepage
    It's zoekmp3.nl. Typo. :)

  • Napster? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:21PM (#9168694) Journal
    So are services that merely provide indexing and contact data for other systems legal under Dutch law?

    Napster, for one? Sharereactor, etc?

    • Re:Napster? (Score:5, Informative)

      by InternationalCow ( 681980 ) <mauricevansteensel.mac@com> on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:26PM (#9168725) Journal
      Yes, see for instance the KaZaa ruling [com.com]. Under Dutch law, you're not prohibited from providing a framework for file sharing. The provider is not responsible for illegal actions taken by the users.

    • Re:Napster? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:58PM (#9168893) Journal

      For now.

      Look at the details about "Stichting BREIN [anti-piracy.nl]", particulary about the participants. See anything familiar for you american folks? Anyways, considering the people backing BREIN, I highly suspect they will do the same around here, namely sue people and lobby their asses of until a court rules in their favour. Unfortunately, this whole lovvying and sueing thing doesn't work well over here in the Netherlands. Heck, nothing bureaucratic works well over here, for that matter. But I do recall they managed to force an eMule site to drop hyperlinks and replace them by plain text links...

      Apart from that, they just attemp to spread around a fair share of FUD. They barely get any media attention, no one really gives a damn about them and their "news" ( In dutch only, sorry... Try and have a chat with the Babelfish about that. ) is about as biased as Slashdot articles. So all in all, not an organization anyone really takes serious. Then again, the big financial backing from the BSA and MPAA is sort of worrying...

  • Good news for Google! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Henrik S. Hansen ( 775975 ) <hsh@member.fsf.org> on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:23PM (#9168710) Homepage
    No more sleepless nights for Google's CEO!

  • Good news for Dutch hosts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bill_Royle ( 639563 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:24PM (#9168713)
    Sounds like Dutch webhosts are the most likely now to be the hosts for copyrighted mp3 sites, provided the mp3 files are held elsewhere. After all, if a website's having to change it's DNS every few weeks as it is booted from one host to the other, it makes sense to just host in a safe haven.

    Still, downloading Mp3's via links sounds so inefficient!

    • Not likely (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Sounds like Dutch webhosts are the most likely now to be the hosts for copyrighted mp3 sites"

      Not likely, the key here was there was no link between the site indexing the MP3s and the sites infringing copyright. If there was then it would have been a conspiracy.

      The scenario you describe sounds like the site and the provider of the MP3s are the same person/same group of people (even if they're not stored on the same site). In that case they could be sued as an active party to the actual infringement.

  • Aah thaat's greaat news (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:28PM (#9168736)
    A Dutch court in Haarlem has cleared Techno Design, the operator of

    I hear the court in Waatts and Columbiaa Heights are still deliberating...

  • not good (Score:1, Interesting)

    by cybergrunt69 ( 730228 )
    I don't think I like this. Yes, its a quick way to find and download a song, but it makes it WAAAYYY to easy for the RIAA-style corporations around the world to find exactly the people sharing.

    I might have shared an MP3 or two, but I'm not about to publish my www/ftp site to the world - thats about as bad as leaving a calling card for the incoming summons...

    I'll stick with the completely anonymous P2P networks.
    • ``I don't think I like this. Yes, its a quick way to find and download a song, but it makes it WAAAYYY to easy for the RIAA-style corporations around the world to find exactly the people sharing.''

      So? This means they find those who infringe on their copyrights, which is what they should be doing, instead of suing the people who provide a service without breaking the law.

      I never saw any wisdom in suing Napster. Now the sharers are all scattered over different networks with much less control over their user

  • google media search? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by thepoopman ( 780332 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:36PM (#9168778)
    so will google be adding audio and video searches now that it can back itself up with a court ruling (albeit dutch)?

  • Waiting for... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    a country where it's legal to place copyrighted files on a public accessible server.

    • Re:Waiting for... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by thepoopman ( 780332 )
      well, in canada, it's perfectly legal to offer files publically for download in file sharing networks. the logic is that if you leave the front door to your house unlocked, you're not going to get arrested if somebody robs you - which i agree with completely. i suppose that could apply to hosting copyrighted material for free also. however, the act of downloading, under this logic, would still remain illegal.
      • i'm not sure i buy your analogy. offering files for download is more like joining a local organisation that exists for the sole purpose of maintaining and distributing lists of what stuff each person has in their house, what times the door will be unlocked and how fast you'll be able to grab copies of said stuff.

        of course, this assumes that you've only got legal copies of copyrighted material for share, and that you're not downloading anything yourself. not very realistic assumptions, either.
        • I guess you could take it that far...

          However, if the 'stuff' each person had was, not stolen but, 'copied' and sampled by the thieves, and if this 'sampling' was the #1 marketer and catalyst for, say, the furniture industry... well, then I'd agree with you.

          The real issue here *should be* that illegal file sharing is the best thing to happen to the music industry since MTV.

      • Re:Waiting for... (Score:2, Informative)

        by SoSueMe ( 263478 )
        umm... you've got that wrong. Uploading [com.com] is illegal. Downloading is not illegal.

        • Re:Waiting for... (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Wrong. A recent court ruling [globeandmail.com] found that putting files into a shared direectory does not amount to copyright infringement. The real detail starts from about the fifth paragraph of the article, bit it's worth reading the whole thing. If you search you should be able to find other accounts of the same case.

          Note that the article you link to talks about what "copyright regulators" think. What we are talking about here is a court ruling i.e. a primary source as to what the legal position actually is.

    • Re:Waiting for... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by benna ( 614220 )
      I think the legal case can be made that one has a right to do this under the first amendment as well as for other reasons. For one, you could argue that you arr not really "sharing" the files. You just put them on YOUR computer for YOUR personal use. If someone happens to download them due to bad security...oh well. But besides that it really is a free speech issue. How can the government tell someone what electric pulses are allowd to come out of their computer. And finally my favorite arguement. T

  • An important distinction. (Score:5, Informative)

    by mumblestheclown ( 569987 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @04:58PM (#9168894)
    Here is a major part of copyright / IP rulings like this that many slashdotters seem to completely misunderstand.

    Copyright law / rulings are *PRACTICAL* *INTERPRETATIONS* made for a particular moment in time, NOT "cast in stone" truths.

    For example, many people might be familiar with some variation of the notion that "photocopying x pages from a book is ok, but x+1 is not" based on some particular norm or interpretation. of course such an interpretation is arbitrary, decided by some judge or other as as a reasonable tipping point where the rights of authors are balanced against the rights of contentholders.

    however, should circumstances change, that tipping point may have to move to preserve that tipping point. this is why, for example, napster failed. sharing to one person, it had long been ruled, was fine; but claiming that this was some sort of "iron law" that could then be exploited to create napster-like services clearly wouldnt work, as by any reasonable interpretation this technologial advance had moved the tipping point.

    Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point. however, contentholders may come back after some period of time and try to make a case that "you know, things have really changed--this has led to significant erosion of our copyrights and we ask the court again to consider this as de facto infringement because we have x, y, and z evidence collected in the interim now" and the court may re-examine it.

    think about this whenever you see any "loophole" plan mentioned by some genius here on how to defeat copyright, such as each user collecting 10 second samples of a song and then the 10 second samples being recombined or some plan where random people each share one page of a copyrighted book or whatever similar nonsense plan they come up with. all such plans basically have the same structure:

    1. find some legitimate characteristic of current "fair use" interpretation
    2. exploit that characteristic, usually through some scale trick that the internet enables
    without realizing that the "interpretation" is just that.. an interpretation that is subject to change.

    What happens then is

    3. copyrightholders appeal, interpretation changes to restore the tipping point
    4. in other words, rights are necessarily curtailed. nobody wants this, but what choice is there?
    5. slashdot story comes out, usual slashbots complain.

    Key point: copyright interpretations are changeable, not iron laws.

    • Re:An important distinction. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lochin Rabbar ( 577821 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @05:52PM (#9169163)

      Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point. however, contentholders may come back after some period of time and try to make a case that "you know, things have really changed--this has led to significant erosion of our copyrights and we ask the court again to consider this as de facto infringement because we have x, y, and z evidence collected in the interim now" and the court may re-examine it.

      No the judge ruled that such acts are not covered by copyright laws because they do not involve copying. It's got nothing to do with fair use.

    • This goes for any law... Law's are for the larger part social contracts for the time period it was written in. When the spirit of the law is forgotten the chance is large it will be abused or misused by some party. And this is what we constantly see, we are seeing now the outcome of too many laws that were never taken out of service after it's usage date. It is getting time that people are going to think of solutions for this as there is a eruption of laws and rules spawn out since the beginning of the las
    • IANAL, but please observe that how the law works is different in the US and in most places in Europe.
      AFIK, in the US the rulings of the courts makes up the law, in large parts of Europe (except GB?)the law is what, and only what, is printed in the original text. Most eropean lawyers do not spend their time going through old cases, as can be seen in american movies. Because the old cases does not give how the law should be intrepreted.
    • Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point

      On the contrary: the court has decided that indexing is neither a copyright infringement (since there is no original content being copied) nor a 'derivative work', and therefor (as someone else already stated here) copyright laws are simply not applicable.
  • A couple of well known eDonkey/eMule links sites have gone down recently for legal reasons, including sharereactor.com and jigle.com [jigle.com]; plus the-realworld.de [the-realworld.de] going down with sharereactor but popping back up later on another server. Since providing a link to a file hash is much less direct than providing a link to the file itself, how does this decision effect these types of sites, if at all?

    Jonah Hex
    • Yes, this decision does affect the mentioned types of sites as well.
      Since it's been decided that pointing to a copyrighted work cannot in itself be a copyright infringment, these sites are allowed under dutch copyright law.

      Considerations: since the site does not hold any part or the whole of the original work(s), there is no 'copying' here and as such copyrights are not involved.

      • Would the same hold true of a Bit Torrent tracker?

        I'm not asking for any ulterior motive. More that it seems like one of the more grey areas like this case seems to be.
        'Cos technically a Tracker never holds a copy of the file, and the .torrent file is merely a glorified pointer to a list of where the file is - but never actually contains part of the file itself.

        I'm under no illusions as to whether it affect the legality of Bit Torrent itself - in that it depends very much on what file it is at the time

        • Under current Dutch law, as far as I understand it (yeah, studied it...) and it's interpretation at the moment, bitTorrent trackers are exactly what you state here: nothing but pointers to content.
          As long as nog part of the original is involved, dutch copyright laws cannot be applicable.

          The only situations in which one could object to BitTorrent trackers are:
          1) when it could be proven in court that the sole purpose of such a tracker would be creating te means to violate copyrights. However, if such an argu

  • google.nl (Score:3, Funny)

    by CGP314 ( 672613 ) <CGP@ColinGregor y P a lmer.net> on Sunday May 16, 2004 @05:50PM (#9169152) Homepage
    Look's like I'll be using Google.nl [google.nl] for my searches from now on. : )


    -Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]

  • Ruling .. continued; downloading legal (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animaether ( 411575 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @06:12PM (#9169272) Journal
    The actual ruling can be read here (Dutch) : http://www.rechtspraak.nl/uitspraak/frameset.asp?l jn=AO9318 [rechtspraak.nl]

    An important bit is point 6.18 :
    "Anderzijds heeft de wetgever blijkens zowel de huidige Auteurswet en de Wet op de naburige rechten als de reeds genoemde Richtlijn en het daaruit voortvloeiende Wetsontwerp bepaald dat op zichzelf het kopiëren (in dit geval door middel van downloaden) van een inbreuk-makend/illegaal mp3-bestand voor eigen gebruik, geen strijd met de Auteurswet of de wet op de naburige rechten oplevert. Het downloaden van bestanden met behulp van de faciliteiten en diensten van Techno Design, is derhalve in beginsel niet inbreukma-kend noch onrechtmatig. Slechts indien de gebruiker van het gedownloade bestand dit weer verveelvoudigt of openbaar maakt kan er sprake zijn van inbreukmakend han-delen door die persoon. Dat Techno Design hierbij enige bemoeienis heeft is echter noch gesteld noch anderszins gebleken."

    In plain English, the judge stated that according to (current) laws, downloading a file - even if it may infringe copyright - as an act on its own is not illegal. Only when a user then proceeds to make and/or distribute a copy of that download does an illegal act occur. He then goes on to say that it was neither claimed, nor shown, that zoekmp3.nl had any direct influence on whether people perform this last part.

    Note that I didn't look up the specifics of the laws involved there, but to the untrained eye it seems to say "Downloading mp3s is legal" - and that's what really got Brein miffed.
    • to the untrained eye it seems to say "Downloading mp3s is legal" - but to the same untrained eye it seems to tell uploading isn't.

  • iRATE radio - it finds free, legal MP3s for you (Score:4, Informative)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @07:12PM (#9169528) Homepage Journal
    Do you realize many musicians provide free downloads of their music that are perfectly legal? We provide such downloads to publicize our work. Here are some MP3s of me playing my piano compositions. [geometricvisions.com]

    If you're tired of searching for new music on the Intarweb, why not just run iRATE radio [sourceforge.net] and let it download MP3s for you. iRATE will even learn to download the kind of music you like!

    iRATE's server has a large database of MP3s that are kept on the musicians' own websites (or MP3 hosting services, like IUMA). There are over 50,000 tracks in its database, with 3,000 Creative Commons-licensed MP3s recently added from Magnatune [magnatune.com].

    iRATE downloads a few tracks, and then you rate the tracks according to your preferences. iRATE's server then compares your ratings to those of other users, and selects new tracks based on your rating patterns. That is, if you and I like the same kind of music, iRATE will download for you the same music that I like. If we disagree, your iRATE will avoid my favorites.

    This process is known as "collaborative filtering".

    iRATE's client and server are both licensed under the GNU GPL, and are written in Java. For Linux, there is a native binary compiled with GCJ, so there are no non-free dependencies.

    There's going to be a native Windows client, but GCJ is not presently able to build a stable Windows binary - so you could help by helping the GCJ team fix that.

    There is a Mac OS X ".dmg" disk image, that runs using the Java runtime that comes with OS X. It looks like any other OS X application. For those who install the Java Runtime Environment, you can use the Java webstart version. You just click a link on iRATE's download page and it installs and runs.

    iRATE's team always welcomes people who want to help with development and testing.

  • wrong language in url (Score:3, Funny)

    by Fuzzums ( 250400 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @07:18PM (#9169551) Homepage
    The dutch word for saerch is 'zeok'.
    The word for search is 'zoek'.

    to search => zoeken
    i search - ik zoek .. - jij zoekt .. - hij, zij, het zoekt .. - wij zoeken .. - jullie zoeken .. - zij zoeken

    the 'oe' is pronounced like the oo in foo)
    ik -> (h)ick

    that's all for now.
    next week we'll cover 'to fnid'.
  • This is good news, but let's see how long things like this will last.

  • Keptin! (Score:3)

    by BCW2 ( 168187 ) on Sunday May 16, 2004 @08:01PM (#9169719) Journal
    There is intelligent life on this planet after all!

  • voice/data (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by jaredcat ( 223478 )
    I strongly recommend that you install a modern PBX as the centralized telephone system and then contract with an IXC (like Qwest, Global Crossing, MCI, or a European equivelent) for all of your voice and data needs. A 30-house complex is equivelent to a medium-sized office in terms of data/voice requirements. Representing a group of that size will allow you get significant volume discounts. For instance, if you can gaurantee 150,000 minutes per month in voice traffic and agree to 2 years of so many megab
  • BREIN is planning to appeal the verdict.

    Did you ever notice how often this phrase comes in at the end of judgements against industry? Not go to the legislating body and attempt to get the law changed. But instead try to get the courts to enforce the law the way they want.

    Could it be -- heaven forbid -- that these laws are not popular and most people don't want them? People who vote don't want them?

    Just who owns and runs the country anyway?

    • On their web site, BREIN tries to spin the story in true Scientology-fashion as a Big Win. "However," they continue, "there are still a few reasons to appeal".

      According to Webwereld.nl, Tim Kuik of the BREIN Foundation said "The parliament should also outlaw the downloading of music, just like buying other illegally offered goods is also forbidden."

      If anything, BREIN is adaptive. Two days after the verdict, they started offering a course in how to lock the upload part of your children's P2P tool.
  • I wonder if this is the first time in Slashdot history that the word "dutch" has been used in two consecutive stories.

    RP
    • 3 consecutive stories involving the Netherlands -- Ask Slashdot: Wiring a Neighborhood? (in Holland) Google IPO Swami (dutch auction) Your Rights Online: Dutch Portal Cleared of Copyright Infringement This is 30% (3/10) of /. first page stories. And they are all together!

  • The Haarlem court's ruling may seem an example of famous Dutch 'tolerance' and the 'liberal' political climate here, but unfortunately the country is quickly losing those characteristics, that have always been persistently overemphasised, to begin with.

    Things are rapidly changing in the Netherlands.

    What are we famous for? Rembrandt will not be outlawed, but things are looking bleak when it comes to drugs, prostitution and immigration. Well, the present right-wing government is reconsidering long-standi

  • eh google aint in the US. its in ireland.
  • Unlike what Slashdot parrots, ZoekMP3 sued BREIN, not the other way around. IIRC (I may certainly be mistaken), BREIN started bullying several MP3 links pages, usually with the desired effect. ZoekMP3 wanted a pre-emptive verdict that what they were doing is legal, and received just that from the Haarlem court.

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