TorrentFreak

One third of the Dutch population downloads “pirated” music, movies and games from the Internet, and for a while the government has been wondering what to do about it. In recent weeks a “download ban” was put on the political agenda, but the House of Representatives struck down this plan yesterday. Downloading remains legal, and in exchange rightsholders will be compensated through a private copying tax on various media storage devices.

As in many other countries around the world, downloading music and movies is hugely popular in the Netherlands. A massive 30% of the population is said to do so. Presently, the Dutch see downloading and copying movies and music for personal use as “fair use” and not punishable by law. In return, copyright holders are [...]

As part of a case between several computer media companies and the organization responsible for copying levies, the Dutch Supreme Court is set to seek the advice of the European Court of Justice concerning the right to make private copies. Currently it is considered acceptable for Dutch citizens to download copyrighted material for personal use, even if that content comes from an illicit source such as file-sharing networks. A ruling in the wrong direction could change all of that.

Traditionally, The Netherlands has been one of the most lenient countries when it comes to the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, but this will change if the Government gets to implement their new plans. Under new legislation downloading of copyrighted movies and music will become outlawed. The lawmakers claim that this change is needed to crack down on ‘pirate sites’.

According to an ever increasing wave of emails to TorrentFreak, it appears that residents of at least two countries can no longer access Demonoid. Not only are users from the Netherlands complaining they cannot access the site but now it’s the turn of Brazilian BitTorrent fans to wonder why they’ve been cut off.

Most of the world’s largest and most important BitTorrent trackers are situated in The Netherlands, so you would expect that if anyone would be a target of Dutch anti-piracy oufit BREIN, they would. Wrong. BREIN has a long record of ignoring the heavyweights and picking on the little guy. Their latest target is dsb-tracker.org, a tiny BitTorrent tracker few will have heard of.

A new project by the name of Aufero integrates BitTorrent in the Windows Vista Media Centre. According to the unnamed developer, Aufero is an attempt to bring BitTorrent content to your living room sofa.