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mcgrew! I didn't realize you could read Dutch.
Stichting de Thuiskopie: http://www.thuiskopie.nl/nl/ov... (you'll want the "Downloaden is toch illegaal?" link.

BREIN: http://www.anti-piracy.nl/wat-... (you'll want the second paragraph)

"You wouldn't download a car" in TV antipiracy commercials pretty much puts the lie to the claim that they're OK with any downloading at all.

I think you may have interpreted 'and others' as including RIAA/MPAA/etc. This was within the context of The Netherlands :)

And yes, I too would download a car! Though I wouldn't steal the raw resources required to make that download happen. Of course if those could also be downloaded...

``Mr. Henderson is an idiot, no offense to the intellectually challenged out there.''

I'm not sure who is the real fool here. Is it the man who spouts the lies, or the people who fall for the rhetoric?

We have a similar situation in the Netherlands: we pay a levy on blank media, which is used to compensate rights holders for the copying we are allowed to do. Downloading of music and video is included among the things you are allowed to do. Yet, our copyright watchdog, BREIN, has issued statements and publications where they have called such downloading illegal. Does that make them idiots? Perhaps, but almost everybody I have asked actually believes that downloading music and video from the Internet is illegal. People will even say they have "illegally downloaded" something if they downloaded it from the Internet. I think the real fools are all those people who believe that what they do or want to do is illegal, even though it isn't. Also, I am really, really pissed off at BREIN for propagating these falsehoods.

Here in the Netherlands, I've tried several times to reach the website of BREIN which claims to be an authority on these matters, to learn more about this issue. I've been trying for weeks actually, but every single time I click on anti-piracy.nl the server fails to acknowledge my request.

FWIW, I'd really like to be a customer of Netflix, Hulu, and/or Pandora, but those sites are also blocked for me here in the Netherlands, and to-date I've seen nothing offered in comparison to purchase or support via advertising.

The law in Spain is that any non-profit copying of material is OK. All the judge has done is make it clear to the RIAA that P2P involves no exchange of money so therefore it's legal under Spanish law.

The same is true for the Netherlands, although Brein pretends it's otherwise. So here you can download copyrighted content for private use. Another thing that's legal is to make a copy of a cd or dvd for a friend or relative. As long as you don't ask money for it, and don't do this in batches (like 30 cds for the complete classroom) you won't have any problems.

I would not be so sure. They are appealing to the EU Human Rights court thepiratebay.org which is also here echr.coe.int Also they are being asked to appear in Court in Netherlands, which the official mail got lost so they ( Brein Foundation sent tweets twitter.com inviting them to court. Oh and just for the record this waas submitted to /. earlier just some anti copyright people modded submissions down so it would not get posted.

Brein is not a government-appointed foundation, it's a foundation which is set up and paid for by the music-industry. They act like they have the authoroty to prosecute just like the RIAA does, but they have just as much right to do so like every other individual. One of the founders of Brein is the organisation BUMA/STEMRA which is the dutch organsation for collection and distibution of royalties for the componists, bands and producers. Over here if, as a componist or a band, you don't become a member of BUMA/STEMRA you can't have cd's made. You'll have to burn them yourselves or you have to go abroad. When you become a member you'll have to pay quite some money, so only the real popular bands will be able to gain some money.

The institute is called "BREIN", which is an acronym for "Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland", or Protection of Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands. See http://www.anti-piracy.nl/. "Brein" is Dutch for "brain".

The idiots at Brein released a similar "tool".

Basically, all it did was indiscriminately delete all your *.mp3, *.avi, *.zip (!) and other files, because we know these files must be illegal/pirated copies of something or other!

Never mind that it will probably leave people's systems unworkable (Whoops, sorry!)...

n France all blank writable media is subject to a special tax.

In Belgium as well. What I once saw was a calculation of how much illegal music was downloaded and how many blank CD's were sold. Article in Dutch

A short resume of the numbers:
50M black CD's
19.4M CD's sold. 10% is to be illegal or 1.9M
That leaves 48M blanck CD's NOT for CD's

Some other info also in Dutch
A group like Clauseu (Very famous in Belgium) gets 2 EUR per sold CD. They sell about 60.000 where they would have sold 200.000 to 250.000 in the same period previously. 15 years ago when they startd they got 30 cents per album.

Yes, the second URL is extremely biassed. Yet it is still interesting enough to actually SEE the numbers.

For now.

Look at the details about "Stichting BREIN", 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...

The Dutch equivalent of RIAA/MPAA (BREIN) does it smarter: Their official position is NOT to prosecute small "offenders", on the grounds that there is no viable legal alternative (in the netherlands anyway) for downloading music yet. Undoubtably this is better PR than the sue-a-12-year-old approach of RIAA.

Ofcourse how they define "small" is anyone's guess.

I being former military am ASHAMED of our government right now!

Well, you're not the only american who's ashamed of his goverment. I hear it plenty of times. But sadly, there ARE goverments that bend over massively to US goverment demands. Back here in the NL, our prime minister is a prime example of being a bit too much pro-US, usually agreeing on matters before they are even officially proposed to our goverment by the US goverment. There are officials that are even worse, who I suspect of being nothing more then a meaty puppet for Bush.

And well, let's see... We don't have an overly active SCO-esque thingy going on over here, our stock market scandals are far less far reaching because our legal system doesn't allow for anything spectacular. I could pretty much nuke a small town and get away with an apology, so imagine how strick they are on stock fraud. We DO have our equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA, called "stichting BREIN" (click the pretty little Union Jack (Yes, the english flag.) for an english translation.) which already threatened "major" P2P users. Take a good look at the supporters of the whole organization. Yes, that reads MPAA, Motion Picture Association of America. Supporting anti-piracy here in The Netherlands. Wee. When do we become the nth state of the USA and will I get US citizenship?

Bastards. Both of our goverments. Christian fundamentalist capalists rule the world. Oh rapture!