This was about people residing in the country illegally. Everyone understands the headline immediately, but it's still pretty ridiculous.
You see copyright law technically doesn't restrict illegal downloading. It only limits distribution, and technically that means uploading, not downloading. So there was a series of court cases that said as much [1].
So now that case has been invalidated, and downloading material without a licence is now judged illegal in the Netherlands (like everywhere else).
One caveat that this case has for copyright holders is that it was judged to be a civil offence, not a criminal one. So illegal downloading cannot use police resources, and the copyright owner must sue (or appoint someone to sue on their behalf) before any action can be taken by the courts. Such action can only include financial sanctions [2], no jail time or impounding.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/113968/article.html [2] keep in mind that not paying a court-ordered restitution IS a criminal offence. So turning a civil offence into a criminal one is possible. It has historically not been done (meaning in the last century, before that it was actually common).
To my knowledge in Germany and the entire USA only uploading is illegal, not downloading. Because of this only people who use file-sharing software like bittorrent or similar get sued.
Acting against the downloading itself is a whole new ballgame.
Both do better with more people being aware of them and their content being seen or heard by more people. And, they are not the ones who are going to afford the types of lobbying and legal prosecution that it takes to go after their downloaders.
The only people benefiting from these laws are the very large studios which continue to pull in record profits year after year. The people hurting is everyone else.
Also I cannot imagine those indie movie makers profiting much from robber baron constructions like BUMA STEMRA, all indie music makers I know personally really hate their guts and feel stolen because they are forced to pay their fees to play gigs or press vinyl but never ever get a decent kick back.
Areas with nearly no migrants and no long-standing tolerance or liberal values continue to have no migrants and no tolerance or liberalism.
A few very poor areas with poor populations continue to suck for both 'migrants' and 'native Dutch', as they always have. Both sides and a few opportunist populists overplay these areas. This situation would exist if the 'migrants' were Muslim, Catholics, or Rastafarians, because it really isn't about values, but instead economics and racism.
So essentially I'm not allowed to download a movie, but I'm allowed to load it in my browser and watch it later.
However! If I copy the file from the browser's cache to another directory, then that's again illegal. I find this puzzling, but then again, I won't be the one who complains for having a loophole (or is it?) that allows me to download any movie without fear of retribution.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/viewing-pirated-streams-is-not-ille...
Until now, downloading of copyrighted material such as movies, tv shows and music was allowed for personal use. This apparently has been overruled by an EU court. Quite interested to see what this is going to change....
A very important detail of the fact that downloading for personal use (redistributing, e.g. uploading, has always been illegal) was allowed even if the source was "illegal" (e.g. torrents, usenet). The reason for that is that it can be hard to tell whether or not the source you download from is distributing legally or illegally. The above is now no longer OK, apparently, but if you borrow a CD from the library, you can still copy it for personal use just fine. We've kind of reverted to the situation we had before the internet was mainstream.
The reason I think nothing will change is that "distribution" (I use this term loosely to allow a torrent site, for example, to fall in this category for argument's sake) has always been a target, and individuals downloading for personal use never were. The organization tasked with dealing with copyright infringement has stated to keep its arrows pointed at the distributing side of all this, not the individual downloader.
I'd be very very surprised if it's going to be enforced in any way, due to being almost unenforceable.
The media industry STILL has to work on giving the consumer what they want, and seeing as how Netflix and Spotify are good examples of services that are now available here and seem to be doing pretty good, it might be okay.
The 'home copy' law is so you can create copies for your own use of material you bought yourself, as long as you keep it to yourself - things like transferring a CD to your mp3 player.
Similarly, it is (was?) legal to download copyrighted material to your own computer for your own use, if you already owned the material.
There is/was another loophole in the copyright law, which states it's not allowed to distribute copyrighted material. However, this law doesn't state anything about receiving and using copyrighted material; it's the distributor / uploader that's responsible for that. And since, in the case of internet piracy, that uploader is often not under Dutch jurisdiction, it kinda falls on its face.
Virtually every video, audio or text file of works created in the past century, more or less, is copyrighted. That alone is not the relevant criterion. The criterion of infringement is whether the particular action is authorized by the copyright holder. But this, no one can routinely know in the course of internet activities.
There is no central or public database of works that would reveal even who the copyright owner is - and even if there were, it would have to also record the authorization status of everyone in relation to every work.
So you are looking around online and someone is offering a file - if you are subject to lawsuits, fines or whatever other interference for downloading, then in principle it's not safe to even look at a web page. What the new rule amounts to in practice is something like "well if you infer that the web page is intended to be retrieved, you're probably safe, but you can be penalized for guessing incorrectly about music or videos". (Note that movie companies have actually sued youtube/Google over files including some that the movie companies themselves published on youtube.)
It simultaneously keeps everyone continually vulnerable to selective enforcement by private companies (specifically, big copyright accumulators), and casts a chilling effect on the relationship of fans with artists who would like to release works on more liberal terms than Hollywood companies (can you trust a statement on a web page that something is authorized???).
So what they've actually done is ban the downloading of copyrighted material, not ban the illegality of downloading copyright material since that's a double-negative.
The law hasn't changed. It's been clarified by the European court and the Dutch Government follows this interpretation as of now.
You gain some, you lose some. :)
When the EU declared the DRD no longer in force the Dutch national entities enforcing it immediately stepped up to make sure that it was made clear that nothing would change. And now that downloading from non-sanctioned sources is made illegal there will possibly be prosecution of individuals or renewed efforts to block certain websites. And on top of that all the copy levy will most likely continue to exist.
If there were any balance in this I'd be happy about it.
[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...
Edit: added a link for clarity.
[0]: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2014/04/cabinet_drops_...
This doesn't make sense as a sentence. Surely the Netherlands has a justice system and prisons, and surely those people in prison are there because they were convicted of doing something illegal. So it stands that you can and will be punished in the Netherlands for doing something illegal.
