Man infringes copyrights due to unlawfully publishing educational books

Recently, the Duch Court of Haarlem condemned a man for infringing copyrights, because he e-mailed answers of educational books to different people. He placed the answers on a server and referred to them on his own website. He also placed links on his website referring to digital copies of the educational books which were hosted by cyberlockers. Noordhoff and ThiemeMeulenhoff, publishers of educational books, sued Van A.. The authors of the educational books transfered their copyrights to these publishers.

Van A. defended his acts by stating that the Dutch Copyright Act did not protect educational books, but in vain. The books, and especially the specific outcome of the answers, were based on creative choices of the author and therefore copyright protected works.(recital 4.4). His plea that an e-mail directed to a single person wasn’t considered as publishing did not succeed either, now that was proven that Van A. structurally sent the documents to others (recital 4.12).

Van A. is condemned to pay all the costs of the lawsuit and the lawyers and must remove the illegal documents from his site. Now, the documents and links have been removed from his website.

You can read the court ruling here.

Reference: Boek9.nl

By: Karen Groen