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."
It's zoekmp3.nl. Typo. :)
- Agilo
Yes, see for instance the KaZaa ruling. 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.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
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.
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.