Comment by apexalpha
9 months ago
In the Netherlands this is still the law.
Downloading is fine, uploading is not.
We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
9 months ago
In the Netherlands this is still the law.
Downloading is fine, uploading is not.
We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
And of course the "thuiskopieheffing", a tax on any storage device that ostensibly is used to fund those whose media gets copied, is still in effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Netherlan...
As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy
No, it is not your right to copy! If you want to keep using euros and have free travel to other Eurozone countries, you need to respect EU law. The tax does not respect EU law because it makes no effort to actually offset losses to copyright holders.
Your comment doesn't even make sense! The intention was never to make piracy okay, it was to offset a tiny fraction of the financial losses. These financial losses are still occurring even now that piracy is formally illegal, so the tax is still justified.
More generally this seems a form of freeloading: picking the parts of the EU that you like, ignoring the parts that don't. Who cares about society, it's just me me me. Pure selfishness.
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Weird, TIL.
This has never been enforced though.
It certainly has!
https://stichtingbrein.nl/largest-ever-criminal-action-again...
https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-odido-is-ordered-to-bl...
https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-brein-reports-two-pira...
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These days for books at least Anna's Archive is the place to go.
https://annas-archive.org/activity
Maybe Meta has a "trading desk" in the Netherlands. :-)