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Dutch court rules that discussing piracy is the same as committing piracy

Started by Juana, June 08, 2010, 09:56:40 PM

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Juana

Via Boing Boing
QuoteA Dutch court has ruled that disclosing the general location of files that infringe copyright is the same thing as infringing copyright itself. The website FTD has a forum where users discuss which Usenet newsgroups contain infringing movies. They do this in plain language, the Dutch equivalent of, "Hey, the group $FOO has the movie $BAR in it." The discussions don't include links. The Dutch court has ruled that hosting a discussion that includes conversational descriptions of infringing files is the same as publishing links to those files is the same as hosting the files yourself. This is a major overturning of Dutch jurisprudence, and a disaster for free speech; the potential chilling effect for anyone who might host a forum or comment section is enormous.

Tomorrow is the Dutch election. The Dutch Pirate Party is campaigning on this issue: "When reaching landmark decisions that overturn years of jurisprudence, neither the judge nor the issue is served when it turns out that the judge in question is in business with the copyright-lawyer from the party benefiting from this shocking verdict. The fact that this joint enterprise mainly offers courses on 'counter-piracy' at €900 per day, makes the situation appear even muddier still. If the Netherlands wants to avoid looking like a banana-republic where the law is for sale to the highest bidder, it is urgent that parliament takes control of the debate on copyright-reform, and brings it back into the public arena where this discussion belongs."

What the hell?


eta link
"I dispose of obsolete meat machines.  Not because I hate them (I do) and not because they deserve it (they do), but because they are in the way and those older ones don't meet emissions codes.  They emit too much.  You don't like them and I don't like them, so spare me the hysteria."

Elder Iptuous

Awesome. :horrormirth:

hey i heard they engage in human trafficking in Bangkok...
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just a minute.... someone's knocking at my door.  brb...

Triple Zero

Yeah that's Stichting Brein (translated: "The Brain Foundation", yeah wtf)

The main guy, Tim Kuik is basically a slimy mobster who [as blog GeenStijl.nl puts it] "has the recording industry lobby fist-deep up his ass".

For example, "in September 2009 BREIN CEO Tim Kuik attracted controversy when in a news conference he stated he's currently using a laptop confiscated from a "pirate" and given to him by someone involved with the case." [from wikipedia]

Today is voting day, I'm still on the fence whether I'm going to vote Pirate Party or GroenLinks (green party).

But it's 9am now, and I have until 6pm to make up my mind (technically until 9pm but I'll be making dinner for a group of friends then).

I gotta check, I picked up somewhere that GL was not against a European Internet filter* but that seems really really strange for them, since on any other talking point about privacy and digital civil rights they're really good. And they're not dumb either (especially not Femke Halsema, who I consider one of the brightest politicians today), so maybe they retracted it. I'm gonna be reading/browsing some party programs later on today.

On the other hand, there's the Pirate Party, who naturally has everything considering privacy and digital civil rights down perfectly. It is a topic I care deeply about, but not the only topic. Although it would be great if they just got one seat or something. But on the other hand, if it takes one vote away from GL... And the other problem is that they really suck at politics, maybe online they are all that, but when faced with a camera, they appear as weak stuttering nerds. They should have gotten a spokesman with some media training and debate skills, because even though I agree with their talking points, it made it real hard to respect them ..

[* initially against child porn, which makes it seem like a good idea. except that filtering those websites wouldn't help a bit since the majority of traffic isn't being traded via websites at all. and even then such a filter would be trivial to circumvent for a paranoid internet pedo that is adept at using proxies anyway. so it doesn't work, but it does cost money time and resources to implement, and creates both the infrastructure and precedent for one day filtering other, "subversive" stuff taking away our freedoms ]
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Zyzyx

Seems to me the internet is advancing too fast for legislation to keep up.

And now for a (mostly) baseless conjecture! In ten or twenty years we will see the utter death of net neutrality across the civilized interbutts. Does anyone else see world governments stepping in to clamp down on this beast?

Iason Ouabache

Quote from: Zyzyx on June 14, 2010, 03:30:10 PM
Seems to me the internet is advancing too fast for legislation to keep up.

And now for a (mostly) baseless conjecture! In ten or twenty years we will see the utter death of net neutrality across the civilized interbutts. Does anyone else see world governments stepping in to clamp down on this beast?
Newsweek just did a good article about that: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/05/the-front-line-is-online.html

We need to push for internet access as a fundamental human right before the governments and corporations decide to put limits on it.
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Kai

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Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
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BabylonHoruv

So would citing people specifically for filesharing in court be considered piracy?
You're a special case, Babylon.  You are offensive even when you don't post.

Merely by being alive, you make everyone just a little more miserable

-Dok Howl

Triple Zero

BabylonHoruv, no. As far as I understand, retarded as the ruling is, it is still based on the specific condition that the discussion facilitates and aids piracy.

It's important to realize the history of this FTD forum. Thing is, binaries newsgroups on usenet are served locally straight from ISPs, which means their clients get the files at the absolute maximum speed that is possible on the network*.

A usenet post has a maximum size, so the movies are split into many many parts as a RAR archive. So yeah when you get a torrent that contains like 30 R01, R02, R03 files, it's because the original came from a newsgroup and the uploader was too lazy to unRAR it before uploading. It does usually imply that it's a "scene" release and therefore good quality rip, though.

So this FTD forum what it is (or was) now is just a forum. But a few years back it came with a special piece of software that would allow you to not only browse the forum, but search for files and fetch the files from newsgroups (if you have a good usenet provider, something which any Dutch ISP has by default in their package but hardly anyone actually uses cause it's kinda obscure like IRC), and unRARs them and allow you to rate them, request reposts of certain parts of the archive (cause newsgroups postings have a limited lifetime), and a whole bunch of other features like that.

So at first FTD was a sort of forum-with-software package that was a few years back ruled as totally infringing piracy enabling horrible demon software. And I can't really disagree with the court on that one, cause as far as I understand it was pretty much a point-and-click social downloading tool. [except that I am all for piracy, but the ruling was kind of sound]

So after that ruling, FTD disabled a bunch of features in their tool, or maybe disabled the entire tool [I dont remember the exact story] and all was fine for a while. But the Brein foundation didn't have enough. So they sued FTD again, and they also won again. So, under court pressure, FTD disabled or outruled pretty much any usenet-enabling feature on their servers and the only thing that was left was basically a forum-community of people talking about usenet binary newsgroups posts, and indeed stating things like "file X was posted on newsgroup alt.binaries.Y.Z".

Which basically meant that, even though it was made harder (people had to use their own usenet clients), massive scale highspeed downloading was still going on. So I can understand that Brein, as an evil corporate content industry lobby group, kept pushing charges and sueing FTD again.

IMO, Brein should not have won this particular case because FTD really was no longer infringing anything. Unfortunately, I suppose that given FTD's history of being a point-and-click usenet newsgroup community downloading tool, and even though they technically ceased doing exactly what they were sued over at every step, the Dutch legal system has a kind of "pragmatism" built in**, which allowed the judge to rule that basically the bad thing this is really about was still going on.

Please note I'm not trying to defend the decision (you know me).

But it's as much FTD's fault as it is Brein's and the judge's: Cause if FTD talked this over with a good proper piracy-friendly lawyer specialized in digital copyright legislation, they might have seen this coming and could possibly have made an informed decision about setting yet another dangerous precedent step forward to strangling our digital/online/electronic freedom***.

I'm not really sure what the alternative for FTD should have been, though, so maybe this is bullshit--I'm not a lawyer and while I know a fair bit of Dutch copyright and IP law, I don't know all the details either.

* This is because ISPs and other usenet-providers exchange the usenet posts using some "mailman" protocol, and they need to download posts only once at which point they can pump it to any number of clients at maximum local speeds. What puzzles me is that this basically implies that the ISPs must be involved in exchanging humongous amounts of infringing binary data on a truly massive scale. But because they are just the infrastructure providers, this is okay. I read about some interesting loopholes on becoming an infrastructure provider by simply opening your wifi router as a public access point.

** Which usually works in people's favour and makes rulings a lot more fair. It basically allows judges to use their common sense in determining fines, penalties or punishments. Unfortunately it can be gamed by lawyers when the case is about a topic the judge isn't that familiar with (like Internets). On the other hand, it also caused the famous Brein vs KaZaA ruling that "uploading is copyright infringement but downloading is not" (something like 10 years ago, it's been amended in all sorts of ways by now).
The main thing it's useful for, however, is to make the punishment fit the crime for smaller criminal cases. Cause usually if some shady dude got into a fight or stole some shit or sold the wrong kind of drugs, there's a whole background story why the guy's doing this, and it's often no use to ruin the guy's life by throwing him in jail for X years, so instead he gets a fine and community service. Which on the whole benefits society a great deal because the repellant is still there ("you could've gotten X years") and the judge will make damn sure the guy is fully aware of the consequences when if there will be a next time he won't be as lucky. On the other hand, this is exactly the reason why parties like Geert Wilders' PVV complain that punishments in our legal system are too soft. Because it instills a sense of unfairness in people when bad guys get community service. Except that all the stats show that recidivism is WAY lower this way than it would be when throwing people in jail all the time. Plus it's cheaper, cause if you've seen Dutch prisons, except for the no freedom thing, they're pretty nice on the inside.

*** If you're in the US and this scares you, donate some cash to the Electronic Frontier Foundation if you can spare it. Or Bits of Freedom if you're Dutch. I've been following their actions and they both really do superb work.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Cramulus

wow, this is all incredibly interesting. Thanks for filling us in, zilch!

I was talking to Cainad yesterday about Nietzsche's Genealogy of Good and Evil. In it, he talks about how most of the morals we've inherited are actually just accidents -- things that may have been important at one time, but are no longer really relevant to sustaining a healthy functioning society. For example, once upon a time laws against blasphemy were defending against a legitimate threat. But we keep observing these laws because they are traditional, and moral imperatives are hard to put aside.

And this is one of those cases where I think we're observing this in action. Laws 5, 50, 100 years from now are going to be written based on this really obscure stuff taking place on forums and shit right now. And this whole lawsuit strikes me as a little bit archaic, because they're still treating data as if it's a physical artifact that can be owned and hoarded and taxed. I hope our kids will have better language to describe what's going on right now.