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Dutch Court Orders Lycos to Reveal Client
linumax writes to tell us InformationWeek is reporting that the Dutch Supreme Court ruled against Lycos last Friday stating that they wrongly protected the identity of a user who posted "slanderous allegations" against an internet postage-stamp dealer. From the article: "The dealer and claimant, identified in court documents only as A. Pessers, took Lycos to court in 2003, seeking the details of its client so he could pursue financial damages allegedly resulting from the allegations."
Brain (or Brein in Dutch) is a government-appointed foundation which acts as the 'watchdog' of the Dutch entertainment industry. Unfortunately they get way too much power and act like the Gestapo. Paying Brein is like paying off the mafia for protection money.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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".
said in a statement that the ruling will enable it to seek damages from people who illegally swap copyrighted software, music and movies over the Internet
I wonder how they are going to _prove_ they suffered damages. In the Netherlands it's vital to prove loss of income due to the commited fact, for each individual case.
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.
It is no longer government-appointed. Just about the only good thing our Justice minister did was removing the special powers Brein had.
Another key point is that they can't do mass subpoenas based on this verdict: Each and every one has to be checked by a judge, so there will be no mass suing of 10 year olds. Furthermore, we don't have hundreds of thousdands of dollars in statutory damages per MP3 shared.
And downloading is still legal. I'm not losing sleep over this.
About the ruling itself: Generally, in Europe, free speech isn't as protected as in the US, and slander or libel or hate speech WILL get you in trouble. This ruling is in line with the general spirit of the law.
That is not completely fair. First off all, it's simply not true that one cannot make cd's without being a member. One can always have duplicates printed, it's just not very smart, because if a radio station picks it up and you're not a member of BUMA, the radio station will pay to BUMA for your music, but the money will never arrive in your pocket Second, a membership of BUMA/STEMRA costs you about 50 euros a year, which I do not consider as being an awful lot. If you then compose or play a bit of music (a song, a commercial, a leader for a tv show, whatever) and register that at buma, you get money per second that it's aired. For a commercial on national television, this is upto 50 cents a second. For commercial on a local tv station, this is 10 cents a second. As a commercial in the netherlands usually lasts something like thirty second, that means that even on local tv, you get 3 euros per time the commercial is aired. with those numbers, the 50 euros a year is very well spent. one can ofcourse critisise BUMA/STEMRA. For instance, it is very bad that they have such a huge overhead. The fact that they are not very open about what their overhead is, shows you how large it is. 8 bmw's infront of the office suggests that people are earning a lot of money their, while composers and musicians are struggling to get by.