Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 31st Jul 2009 15:46 UTC
Yesterday, the Dutch online community was surprised by a verdict from a judge who declared that The Pirate Bay had to make itself unavailable in The Netherlands. This verdict was cast in a case the Dutch RIAA/MPAA-like organisation BREIN had started against The Pirate Bay. With it being a widely known and established fact that downloading copyrighted content off the internet - even if the upload was illegal - is not illegal in The Netherlands, where does this verdict come from? Is it truly a win for the entertainment industry, and a loss for Dutch consumers? Not really - the situation is much, much simpler than that.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I seriously doubt the Dutch DA or the judge don't know TPB is Swedish.
But other than that you raise an interesting point.
Take for example the Dutch softdrugs policy. This policy aims to reduce the abuse of softdrugs and its negative side-effects by regulating it instead of prohibiting it. Notwithstanding negative criticism by ignorant and/or uninformed people like Dr. Phil, our policy mostly succeeds in achieving its goals. Regulating drugs actually greatly reduces the appeal it has to many people and prevents side-effects by bringing everything out in the open.
There's one glaring weakness in our policy though. It doesn't work for people who are not from the Netherlands... By far most of the drugs related problems we have are coming from the French (at least in the south).
But I'm not here to discuss our liberal drugs policy. I mentioned it because the problem is very much similar to the point you raised. Obviously the coffeeshops (our legalised softdrugs PoS) are all located within the borders of the Netherlands. Question is, could we legally prevent foreigners from acquiring drugs in the Netherlands? Or better, could a French court prohibit Dutch coffeeshops to sell drugs to French people? I highly doubt it. All they can do is make try to make sure no-one has drugs on them when they cross the Belgian-French border. Even if we ourselves would want to do this (there are plans), I doubt it would be possible given that Lady Justice is blind and nobody is allowed to discriminate other (EU) citizens (freedom of travel, goods, work etc).
Same goes for the PB case: is it legal/constitutional to deny certain groups of people access to a service or good, without proving that each and every individual of the group is guilty as charged in a place where all people (including foreigners) are equal under the applicable law? Is it legal to do this on the basis of nationality? Can this be enforced by a foreign (Dutch) court? In my layman's opinion Brein has to convince the court that the answer to all these questions is a definitive 'yes', if they want to enforce this.