Netherlands bans illegal downloading

To Clarify, banning illegal downloading sounds quite logical.

Until now, downloading of copyrighted material such as movies, tv shows and music was allowed for personal use. This apparently has been overruled by an EU court. Quite interested to see what this is going to change....

I think very little will change. A little background: The Netherlands has for a long time allowed for people to make a copy of media (video, music, but not software), for personal use. This included media you'd borrow from a library, for example, or even your neighbor. To compensate, carriers (optical media, flash memory and the like) are a bit more expensive because an additional fee (of several euros; height depends on the size of the medium more or less) is added to the price of said media. Then, the internet came to be and suddenly you could make a copy easily, but the rules were left unaltered, but the compensation went up in price.

A very important detail of the fact that downloading for personal use (redistributing, e.g. uploading, has always been illegal) was allowed even if the source was "illegal" (e.g. torrents, usenet). The reason for that is that it can be hard to tell whether or not the source you download from is distributing legally or illegally. The above is now no longer OK, apparently, but if you borrow a CD from the library, you can still copy it for personal use just fine. We've kind of reverted to the situation we had before the internet was mainstream.

The reason I think nothing will change is that "distribution" (I use this term loosely to allow a torrent site, for example, to fall in this category for argument's sake) has always been a target, and individuals downloading for personal use never were. The organization tasked with dealing with copyright infringement has stated to keep its arrows pointed at the distributing side of all this, not the individual downloader.

I'd be very very surprised if it's going to be enforced in any way, due to being almost unenforceable.

The media industry STILL has to work on giving the consumer what they want, and seeing as how Netflix and Spotify are good examples of services that are now available here and seem to be doing pretty good, it might be okay.

Surely if it was legal to download copyrighted material before, for personal use, then it wasn't... illegal.

So what they've actually done is ban the downloading of copyrighted material, not ban the illegality of downloading copyright material since that's a double-negative.

Here is the legal stuff [1]

[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...

No, they banned the downloading of copyrighted material from illegal sources. You may still copy and/or download copyrighted material from legal sources for personal use.

The law hasn't changed. It's been clarified by the European court and the Dutch Government follows this interpretation as of now.