Usenet Group Sues Dutch RIAA

eldavojohn writes "With the Pirate Bay trial, it's been easy to overlook similar struggles in other nations. A Dutch Usenet community named FTD is going on the offensive and suing BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland). You may remember BREIN (along with the IFPI & BPI) as the people who raided and cut out the heart of eDonkey. This is turning into a pretty familiar scenario; the FTD group makes software that allows its 450k members to easily find copyrighted content for free on Usenet. The shocking part is that FTD isn't waiting for BREIN to sue them. FTD is refusing to take down their file location reports, and is actually suing BREIN. Why the preemptive attack? FTD wants the courts to show that the act of downloading is not illegal in the Netherlands. (Both articles have the five points in English that FTD wants the courts to settle.) OSNews has a few more details on the story."

Re:Recollection

[Darkness404]

No one side can overwhelm the RIAA. However when you have hundreds of lawsuits from various people and organizations, that takes a strain on the RIAA's budget. If they lose a few cases then they lose money, that loss compounded with the crap they call music being promoted, and with them having to bribe lawmakers in order to be able to keep passing laws like the DMCA, it will hurt the RIAA.

All power to 'em

[mmaniaci]

Win or lose, its another story in the news about how flawed the music, movie, and print industry is and how unwilling the players are to modify their business model. They do seem to have a decent legal base, so lets hope for a win!

From the article,

So, supported by two Dutch copyright lawyers and IT experts, FTD have filed a lawsuit against BREIN in which they request the court clarifies these points;

1. That downloading is legal in the Netherlands, even if the uploader committed copyright infringement when he uploaded the material.
2. That directing users to content on Usenet via FTD is legal, even if the material was put there without permission of the copyright holders.
3. That FTD is acting within the law, considering the above.
4. That there is no need for FTD to filter any of the reports its users create which refer to the location of content on the Internet
5. That FTD does not have to remove any of these reports, unless BREIN makes a correct and formal complaint.

Government agencies must go through a series of checks before they prosecute a citizen--the whole "innocent first, prove guilty" thing. For some reason these rules no longer apply when the agency is backed by large, private corporations...

Re:RIAA??!!!

[joe545]

Its like calling the English Parliament the congress of England

It's doubly incorrect as England, unlike its parters in the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) has no parliament of any kind.

WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

When the headline calls BREIN the Dutch RIAA without quotes or any context, slashdot is calling them an arm of the RIAA, not the equivalent, not having similiar purposes, etc.

You are wrong, and so is the headline. Does anybody take English or grammar lessons anymore?

RIAA, MPAA, BSA, rolled into one (sort of)

[Animaether]

Just to note... BREIN is more like the RIAA (music), MPAA (movies(/TV?)) and whatever software interest group in U.S. exists for entertainment titles (so not the BSA, as that's all business such as Photoshop, AutoCAD, Office, etc.) rolled into one.

Each of those do have their actual equivalents (RIAA = BUMA/STEMRA, MPAA = NVPI, ???? = B.I.G.), but BREIN can be seen as the 'parent' organization, but without many of the legal things tying them together.

Did you know....

[isama]

that Brein is dutch for brains? BRAAAAAIIIINS!!!!

Re:a criminal suit vs a civil suit

[Arnoud Engelfriet]

I'm one of the lawyers for FTD. The case we started is purely civil law: we ask the court to confirm that downloading for personal use is legal, and that FTD is doing nothing wrong by letting people identify materials available on Usenet that others may want to download. The criminal aspect relates to a statement by BREIN that FTD is engaging in "criminal activities" by offering their platform. We consider this a form of defamation. But acting against defamation is also a civil action.

Re:FTD is a plague on Usenet

[sakusha]

A useful analogy, but it's worse than that. It's kind of like someone building a superhighway through your backyard. Let me give a specific example.

I used to participate in an alt.binaries group, we traded fairly obscure music (mostly out of print) and it was a low traffic newsgroup (not in the mp3 hierarchy), so even the top Usenet ISPs wouldn't give it much storage space. So we had a generally agreed-upon posting method, no flooding and each person would restrict their posts to about 500Mb per day. We judged that most of the top ISPs gave the newsgroup about 5Gb of file space, so files never expired from old age, they were always pushed off the server. When we limited flooding, posts would last about a month on the server, when everyone posted faster, they expired in about a week. That seemed adequate, everyone was happy, and if files expired early, most users were happy to repost on request (although more slowly a second time).

So after a few go-rounds with FTDers dumping 1Gb floods, and everybody getting pissed off, some FTD asshole starts a 10Gb flood. Regular users are posting a few albums of maybe a dozen files, and their first file is pushed off the server before the last one is even done posting. The FTD idiot isn't even aware that he is flooding off his OWN files, the first 5Gb is being pushed off the server by the last 5Gb. Now THAT is really goddam stupid.

Obviously the FTDers are not aware of common Usenet limitations. They think a Usenet nntp server has unlimited resources, but it doesn't. In an ideal world, every nntp server would have infinite storage space, that is impossible, but it's a basic assumption of the FTD system. They treat Usenet as an infinite resource, they can dump an infinite amount of files anywhere and they expect the system to handle it. I've seen even worse abuses, some FTD asshole will pick some obscure binaries group and use it to dump off-topic files. It doesn't matter where you post an FTD file, you could post mp3s in alt.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape and the FTD servers would locate it just as easily as if it was in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* since their system is designed to handle locating the files. It's indexed on their servers, not under topic categories by newsgroup. They'll dump files anywhere they like, and are answerable to no-one. This has ruined several newsgroups and driven people away from Usenet.

Fuck The Dutch.