Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Portal Cleared of Copyright Infringement
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."
Angel of Haarlem..... U2
(But don't download it you devils)
It's like they have a different word for everything.
It's zoekmp3.nl. Typo. :)
- Agilo
So are services that merely provide indexing and contact data for other systems legal under Dutch law?
Napster, for one? Sharereactor, etc?
May we never see th
By that logic the yellow pages is guilty of all gun crime, because they tell you where to get guns.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
No more sleepless nights for Google's CEO!
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!
Thats a false analogy, because buying guns is not illegal. However, downloading is, and these sites provide direct links to download. A better analogy might be that if the yellow pages provided locations where you can buy drugs.
They decided that according to the LAW it is totally legal. A judge decided this. It has nothing to do with your twisted opinion.
As it should be. If you start declaring that links to *other* places are illegal, watch the very fabric of the net collapse.
You must think beyond the debate about a simple music file link, and towards the larger picture.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A Dutch court in Haarlem has cleared Techno Design, the operator of
I hear the court in Waatts and Columbiaa Heights are still deliberating...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You have to dig pretty deep in the law books to find that this is legal...
Actually, that is daft. It is legal because it is not in the law books at all. It's a good thing the books don't list the finite list of things that are allowed, right?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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.
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
...and France is a leads computer industry.
Mod parent up? cmon that was halarious.
And here we see Andy666 trying to be modded up by repeating a troll he had previously posted, with some success.
Please respect the sign and do not feed this animal.
This, ladies and gentlemen, conclude the Slashdot Zoo visit for the day.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A better analogy might be that if the yellow pages provided locations where you can buy drugs.
Or if someone tells you that you can download files illegally from Kazaa. JAck Valenti should be doing life the amount of times he's told people about this.
Calling 911 for non emergency reasons is against the law and that service is pointed to quite a lot in phone directories.
so will google be adding audio and video searches now that it can back itself up with a court ruling (albeit dutch)?
In Holland they do. :)
you can find softdrugs shops in the yellow pages
"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.
No No ! Here we see the EVIL so called "Roscoe" be anti-French. So cruel is Roscoe to french, do not trust him. Roscoe is rude american tourist, who is lost.
a country where it's legal to place copyrighted files on a public accessible server.
Nice to see that you've put your eBay link back in your profile. 'arrrrrh! That history function is a bitch, ain't it?
By that logic the yellow pages is guilty of all gun crime, because they tell you where to get guns.
Maybe it's more like gun manufacturers, since they also put you 'one click' away from committing a crime.
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:
- find some legitimate characteristic of current "fair use" interpretation
- 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.
And they are.
Sensible people would refuse to consider such obscene advertising.
Stop being so lame, Amerika: your (lack of) gun laws kill more people than almost anything else. You can't show Janet Jackson's nipple of TV but you can go out, take in a Rambo movie, get drunk and buy a gun.
Women around the world laugh at you. You're not real men. Either become responsible members of the global community or fade away.
Mark me as troll, whatever, but I want to know ... why is this touted as a great thing for our rights? They won on a technicality, while still effectively running a site that they *knew* was about copyright infringement with no innocent other means. So, why is this a good thing?
A couple of well known eDonkey/eMule links sites have gone down recently for legal reasons, including sharereactor.com and jigle.com; plus 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
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Yes, I do agree that most around here have that attitude...
However, I wasn't speaking of the actual end result of the link being right or wrong.. Only that banning links to 'improper' things, is a bad precedent.
Just look at the scientologists attacking Google... Or Germany attacking them for 'Nazi paraphernalia'. Or perhaps books on drug manufacture.
The links should be neutral, as they don't actually contain the 'banned' ( depending on where you live, which is another problem ) data...
Sort of like the use of a car.. The car is legal, its how you use it ( to mow people over ) that is bad...
PS, nice work you did on your 'streamer' software.. i used to use it when it was still allowed to 'share' at the office.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And now you bring it up: we (the Dutch) have had most wars with the British that in the OP were mentioned as our protection...
For number of wars with the Dutch the French are high on the list as well, Germany only attacked once. (but then they only became united as a country in the 19th. century).
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Look's like I'll be using Google.nl for my searches from now on. : )
-Colin
TROLL
TROLL
TROLL
oh, did i mention you're a troll?
too bad i don't have mod points, i'd toss you a (+1, Funny)
The actual ruling can be read here (Dutch) : http://www.rechtspraak.nl/uitspraak/frameset.asp?l jn=AO9318
:
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.
...foresee a lot of Americans making the Netherlands their new home...if they'll have us!
The US offers little now other than an uncertain future and more Rumsfeld/Ashcroft-style "security".
Our jobs are being sent overseas and our countrymen to Guantanamo Bay.
And we can't even legally smoke a little dope to take our minds of it.
Europe looks more enlightened with each passing day, so how about it, Holland? Can we come live with you?
If you're tired of searching for new music on the Intarweb, why not just run iRATE radio 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.
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The dutch word for saerch is 'zeok'.
.. - jij zoekt .. - hij, zij, het zoekt .. - wij zoeken .. - jullie zoeken .. - zij zoeken
The word for search is 'zoek'.
to search => zoeken
i search - ik zoek
the 'oe' is pronounced like the oo in foo)
ik -> (h)ick
that's all for now.
next week we'll cover 'to fnid'.
Privacy is terrorism.
This is good news, but let's see how long things like this will last.
There is intelligent life on this planet after all!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
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 megabits of data traffic, you are on much better footing than all 30 residents shopping around for their own deals-- especially if you have special needs like good voice rates to a particular destination (i.e. foreign country).
This is one of the things that I do professionally, so if you would like any help, feel free to send me an email.
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?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Seeing as how the word "dense" can mean "tightly-packed" or "unintelligent" in English. I thought it was funny, anyway.
True story.
I wonder if this is the first time in Slashdot history that the word "dutch" has been used in two consecutive stories.
RP
But in the Netherlands it is the other way around: buying guns is illegal, and downloading music or buying drugs for your own use isn't.
you just might get it. For some cases they already have put it into law: section 2008 on page 87/107
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
for this act see here 2002 Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery from and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the Unites States (section 2008 on page 87)
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
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-standing soft drugs policies, so smoking grass may be illegal in a few years time; pimping was made legal, while prostitutes are being subjected to ever more restrictive laws and regulations, the consequence of which is the creation of a new, underground prostitution scene where all the girls from outside the EU work under bad circumstances and without any rights - which brings us to immigration: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have voiced concern about the way the Dutch regime is presently trying to get rid of thousands of asylum seekers.
To get back to the original topic: the general tendency in Dutch politics being what it is, the introduction of more restrictive copyright legislation will be a matter of time. Here, too, big corporations nearly always get what they want.
eh google aint in the US. its in ireland.
Hence meta-modded "unfair".
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.