Recent hiccups in the otherwise favourable legal climate towards filesharing and piracy in the Netherlands seems to be have attracted attention from the American Record industry. Last month, after a Dutch court decided that placing links to copyrighted material on a website is prohibited in certain circumstances, the admin of Dutch language file sharing site Jou-site.me seems to takes cover.

In an attempt to safeguard his anonymity, Jou-site’s administrator is trying to cover his identity by placing its WHOIS data with Whoisguard.com, a ‘privacy protecting’ organization. However, Whoisguard states in its Privacy Policy that it  will share information about individual users with a third party to comply with applicable law or valid legal process.

Now, Jou-site's admin is convinced that the RIAA is in pursuance of his identity, to enable Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN to start legal proceedings. In anticipation on any legal claims from rights holders and representatives, Jou-site.me states in advance that any of the files that are linked to on the website are not located on the site’s servers. Taking the recent developments in case law in the Netherlands into account, this defense might no longer do…

Read more on recent developments in Dutch case law on the legitimacy of filesharing sites on FutureOfCopyright.com: 

• Preliminary questions to the ECJ from the Dutch Supreme Court on illegal downloading under the Home Copy Regime
• Dutch Court: hyperlinks on website can constitute copyright infringement 
• Dutch weblog GeenStijl sued for linking to Britt Dekker’s Playboy pictures   
• ‘Filesharing community FTD throws in the towel after Dutch court ruling’
• Court of The Hague: FTD did not violate copyright, but stimulated uploading of protected files'

Source: Webwereld.nl