Damn, just when you thought it was safe to chill in the Netherlands, cook up a little heroin, and watch your illegal download bar graphic for Pulp Fiction light-the-fuck-up: our friends at rt.com have reported that The European Court of Justice has bummed everyone out with the recent ruling that that citizens in the Netherlands are no longer allowed to download copyright-protected movies and music and such without, you know, doing that thing where they pay for them first.
Okay, wait, what?
Right. First, a little background: See, just like in America, downloading pirated movies and music is pretty cool all over the world, and lots of European countries are particularly good at it! So good, in fact, that the Dutch had to introduce something called a “piracy levy,” wherein anyone who buys a smartphone, tablet, computer, or other such cool device with storage capacity out the wazoo “pays a 5 euro charge to cover the cost of home copying.”
But, like, SO NOW: the European Court of Justice has decided that this groovy pay-now-steal-later system is illegal (basically because of successful lobbying efforts on the part of various electronics companies who were pissed that their products were more expensive as a result of the levy).
“The objective of proper support for the dissemination of culture may not be achieved by sacrificing strict protection of copyright or by tolerating illegal forms of distribution of counterfeited or pirated works,” the ruling declared, further concluding that the levy system seems to… kinda, sorta, maybe a little bit… encourage piracy a li’l? They also seemed to think that this seemingly groovy non-illegal-ness of pirating stuff left and right also unfairly punished those who bought their films and music from authorized retailers, since they are paying double to record media onto their goody-goody devices.
Oh well. Fine. So yeah; apparently The Dutch government has confirmed the court’s ruling, issuing their own statement (people love issuing those) saying that “downloading copyrighted material for personal use is banned with immediate effect.” And, like, FURTHERMORE or some shit, this-here specific ruling will probably affect what goes down in other European countries where downloading copyrighted works is still allowed (hint: like Switzerland; go to Switzerland).
ALSO, just how all this shit will affect the actual artists (copyright holders) themselves has yet to be seen as well. And, like rt.com suggests, many may actually be worse off as a result of this, as millions of euros worth of revenue that they formally got through that good ol’ piracy levy thing will probably be lost when people, you know, continue to download things illegally without paying a tax for it first. (so, yeah, again: Switzerland! Go to Switzerland!).
• The Netherlands: http://www.government.nl
