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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 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.
so will google be adding audio and video searches now that it can back itself up with a court ruling (albeit dutch)?
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.
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.
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. The RIAA could always come up with a rule that would turn ANY file into a song. All they would have to do is come up with a special codec for that file to match that song. When you think about it for a song to be illegal the codec must be recognized. But then who's to say what is recognized and what is not? This is a slippery slope.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
umm... you've got that wrong. Uploading is illegal. Downloading is not illegal.
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
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."
Wrong. A recent court ruling 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.
Look's like I'll be using Google.nl for my searches from now on. : )
-Colin
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.
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.
There is intelligent life on this planet after all!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.