Dutch gov’t plans to make file-sharing illegal

The Dutch ministry of Justice is preparing legislation that makes downloading and sharing copyrighted material unlawful. The new regulations should take effect within three years. However, it has stated one condition: that the entertainment industry offers enough alternatives by that time. Minister of Justice Hirsch Ballin announced this in a reaction to the copyright report of the Gerkens committee.

The goal of the parliament is to strike the right balance between the rights of producers and artists at the one hand and the rights of the public to access information and culture at the other hand. The current copyright system may have worked in an offline environment, but online, this system falls short of reaching its goals.

The plan is a step forward in preparing sensible copyright for online environments. The plan put forward by the ministry of Justice contains three parts. First, downloading and file-sharing is no longer seen as subject to the home-copy exception. This makes file-sharing illegal. The home-copy exception, a fee charged on blank information storage devices that compensates artists for missed income, will be dropped. Second, parliament encourage the market to develop new licences so people can easily and conveniently access online media. Third, parliament supports the recommendation of the copyright working party that file-sharing will only be made illegal when industry offers solid alternatives to file-sharing in the form of subscription based download services or streaming access to media.

The market gets three years to develop new licences. Simultaneously, parliament creates regulations that outlaws file-sharing, so experiments with new business models will not face unfair competition by pirates.

The future regulations will not be aimed at punishing individual file-sharers, but will target commercial practices that make money by subverting copyright.