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."

Comments

Re:zeokmp3.nl?

[kinzillah]

Maybe thats because in the US, linking to things is just as bad. ie. 2600.com and DeCSS.

Just a thought.

Re:You have to dig pretty deep...

[rramir16]

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.

But they didnt ask you

[nurb432]

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.

Re:But they didnt ask you

[cpghost]

A german court in Hamburg decided that you can be liable for the contents of pages that you link to. Because of this silly ruling, a lot of web sites in Germany include a standard disclaimer citing this ruling, and that the linking webside authors distance themselves from the content of linked-to websites. It's a pretty ugly disclaimer, that is useless, because it doesn't protect you from being sued and convicted anyway. Effectively, this ruling (or similar jurisprudence in other countries) prevents you from linking to any other site with impunity.

Should we follow Germany's example here and put the blame on people who link to sites over which content they don't have any influence?

Re:But they didnt ask you

[Sique]

This is the most misunderstood ruling concerning links in the whole of Germany's juridical history.
The Hamburg ruling effectively said: A general disclaimer doesn't get you out of prison. And what do all those webmasters? They put a general disclaimer in their website, citing the ruling and say: It has to be, otherwise we will be in prison.
Doesn't anyone ever bothered to read the ruling at all?
The Hamburg ruling was against a webmaster who tried to argue that the link he was putting on his website was legal because of the disclaimer in which he stated that he refused responsibility for all links he was providing. And the court said: If you want to distance yourself from the contents a link may provide, you have to do so either specifically in the context of each link, or you have to explain why you can't take responsibility for certain links.
Look at it like this: If someone asks you were he could get cheap car electronics, and you say: Don't make me responsible, but I would try the flea market over there, they sell electronics "dropped from the truck", you are supporting crime, even though you put the general disclaimer in front.
If you say: Stay away from the flea market, they may be cheap, but I doubt the legality of their offerings, then you make clear, what you think about those offerings. This would have been a valid disclaimer.
Be very, very careful with the general disclaimer. One of the linked sites may sue you for libel, because if you distance yourself from them without valid cause, you are just badmouthing them.
And puhlease! Before you are going to put one of those cut&paste disclaimers citing the Hamburg ruling on your website, either read the ruling yourself or ask someone with some law background about the consequences. Those disclaimers don't help you. That's what the ruling, you are quoting, says. The justice will just shake his head and ask you: Why do you quote the ruling and in the same step do exactly the thing the ruling was damning?!

not good

[cybergrunt69]

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.

Re:Good news for Google!

[0x0d0a]

If he moves Google from the US to the Netherlands, yes.

Actually, basing Internet companies in the Netherlands seems to make an awful lot of sense. It's a first-world country, they have relatively permissive laws, and a dense population. Since you're right in the middle of Europe, bandwidth isn't expensive. If you can operate your company anywhere in the world (as is quite possible for a .com), it would seem like countries will start needing to compete for companies.

Not sure how nasty business taxes are, and there's obviously a host of other variables involved, but...

Re:Aah thaat's greaat news

[Anonymous Coward]

Haarlem, Vlissingen, Breukelyn, Deutel Bogt, Vlachte Bosch, Thynevly, Bompties Hoek and Antonies Neus all got a quick coat of english paint when Nieuw Amsterdam became New York.

Re:Aah thaat's greaat news

[Anonymous Coward]

You *do* know New York used to be a Dutch colony, right?

Re:Waiting for...

[thepoopman]

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.

Re:Napster?

[Dark Lord Seth]

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...

Re:Aah thaat's greaat news

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the possible sources for the word Yankee is from the Dutch Jan Kees or John Cheese.

Does this effect ED2K Links as well?

[Jonah Hex]

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

Invasions

[Teun]

Europe has quite the history of countries invading each other.

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).

Re:An important distinction.

[Lochin Rabbar]

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.

Re:Good news for Google!

[troc]

Actually, the Amsterdam that most visitors tend to see bears very little relationship to the rest of Holland! Sure you can wander off the main tourist routes and find "proper" holland but the bit filled with English and Irish Stag and Hen do's, confused US and Japanese tourists, dazed hippie-types and (insert most kinds of extreme over generalisations here) .... is definately not Holland :) For a start you won't see any Dutch people at all, the pervasiveness of sex-shops, coffee-shops, sex museums, peep-shows etc etc is unlike the rest of Holland. etc.

If you do visit Holland it's well worth the time to go somewhere else that Amsterdam Like Leiden, Delft, Haarlem etc as these places have the canals, old gabled houses and nice little Dutch cafes you want to see, without the extreme, over-the-top permissiveness of Amsterdam's old centre. Amsterdam almost like a perverted Disney-esque themepark version of Holland :)

I live in Delft and it's much much nicer. Lots of Dutch things to see (Girl with a pearl earring was filmed there for example) and it still looks "real".

Troc