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In the Netherlands, there used to be no such thing as "illegal downloads". All downloads used to be legal, irrespective of the origin. The basis for this legal viewpoint was the law that deals with most copyright issues (Auteurswet Dutch), which allows people to have copies of copyrighted works for private use and or study (Article 16b sub 1). This led to the creation of a curious system, in which devices capable of storing "content" (USB sticks, harddisks, DVRs, laptops, desktops,...) were levied to compensate the expected loss of income proportional to the device's storage capacity.
That is about to change, as TorrentFreak (English) reports:
The European Court of Justice has ruled that the Netherlands can no longer permit its citizens to freely download copyrighted movies and music without paying for them. In its judgement the Court rules that the current system of a "piracy levy" to compensate rights holders is unlawful.
Important to note is that, as it stands, the law doesn't change it's only to be interpreted differently. The Dutch civilian-rights organization "Bits of Freedom" calls the ban "undesirable" because it opens the door to undesirable blockades, filters and restriction of freedom. You can read Bit's of Freedom's article here (Dutch).
Tweakers.net has created a small FAQ on the subject, you can visit it here (Google Translate) or view the original in Dutch.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Friday April 11 2014, @01:39PM
So, I'm far, far from a scholar of the laws of the Netherlands. That said, my understanding was that a core principle of Dutch law was the Harm Principle, which basically says that something that doesn't harm anyone else is OK, and for any actions that DO harm someone else, the damages are limited to the amount of actual harm done.
Under that principle, you couldn't (as you could in the US) try to fine someone $1000 for (allegedly) downloading a $10 CD.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Friday April 11 2014, @02:59PM
Sure you could! Are lost sales not harmful to the business? If you download one album via a peer-to-peer network, odds are pretty good that someone else downloaded some portion of that file from you. And someone else may then download from them, etc. So there's no clear way to prove how many copies could have been distributed based on your single download. Therefore the harm caused cannot be known, and the maximum possible harm is theoretically infinite*. This is basically the same argument used in the US. There's a lot of games you can play to inflate the harm value of sharing a single copy, assuming the judges are willing to be sufficiently corrupted...
*Yes, infinite, not limited to (cost of CD) * (population of Earth) since people can of course buy multiple copies of the same album...all the way to the absurd case of arguing that if it sold well enough, the workers producing it would get paid more, and perhaps if they got paid more they'd spend it on buying this same CD since it's so popular, thus creating an infinite loop of purchases. I suppose it could be limited by calculating the amount of material on earth, plus anything we could possibly mine from asteroids before copyright expires, factoring in the amount of CDs that could be produced by the total current and predicted human population within that time frame...but at that point you've already inflated the value well beyond the global GDP, nobody's ever gonna pay those fines in full anyway, and we've stretched this thing WAY past the original point. :)