June 8, 2012

New cookie law confuses Dutch website owners

Filed under: IT,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:36 pm

Hardly any Dutch website adheres to the new cookie law that came into force last Tuesday, online tech mag Webwereld reports.

The law, which is a strict implementation of the EU cookie directive, aims to protect website visitors’ privacy by making tracking illegal. Tracking is a way of building a profile of you and your likes by monitoring which websites you visit. This profile can then be used to tailor advertisements to your tastes, or for far more heinous purposes.

Among the larger sites only De Telegraaf has put up a banner informing visitors that it uses cookies, and that they can opt out. As Webwereld points out the banner is not in compliance with the law, which states that website owners must explicitly ask permission for every tracking cookie a site uses.

Enforcement agency OPTA says it is not their job to determine the contours of the law. “We expect the market to take care of that.” The agency told Webwereld it will start enforcing the law right away, but will first focus on “sites with dangerous cookies, and sites with cookies that are hard to remove.”

Arnoud Engelfriet points out that even the government is still serving cookies without permission at rijksoverheid.nl.

24 Oranges is currently looking at its cookie use and responsibilities before the law. As you may gather from the above article, this matter is more complex than it seems at first sight, so apologies for the delay.

In the meantime if you’re worried about your privacy—as you should—consider disabling third-party cookies in your browser and installing ad blockers. Neither method is perfect as far as I know.

(Screenshot: the Telegraaf cookie banner)

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May 25, 2012

Apple finally admits to be bound by Dutch warranty

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:09 pm

A tiny victory for real globalization. After years of pressure by Dutch consumer watchdog Consumentenbond, American electronics manufacturer Apple has finally adapted its warranty for the Netherlands to make clear that is bound by Dutch law.

Last Monday tech news site Webwereld pointed to the new warranty on Apple’s website, which now states: “If you buy an Apple product, you are covered by the limited Apple warranty of one year, optionally the AppleCare Protection Plan, and the Dutch law.” A handy table shows you what these three warranties cover.

Dutch consumer protection law states that a product must live up to a consumer’s reasonable expectations. A laptop battery for instance can be expected to last longer than a year, but the law does not protect you against capacity reduction, since that is something from which all batteries suffer. According to Internet law blogger Arnoud Engelfriet, a warranty can be both narrower and wider than this rule of conformity—a manufacturer could for instance cover battery capacity reduction in its warranty (this is just an example, Apple for instance does not cover capacity reduction).

Earlier Apple claimed that its warranty provided a better coverage than the law.

In the end of course this does not change anything legally. Dutch consumers have always been protected by the law. It’s good though that customers are made aware more of their rights.

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December 26, 2011

Postcodes and road maps liberated in the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:27 pm

It took a couple of lawsuits to put their prospective gatekeepers into place, but both the Dutch postal code data and the Dutch road map data have been set free.

Postcodes used to be determined by the Dutch PTT, and when the company privatized they somehow started claiming ownership. When the government started handing out postcodes for free through its kadaster (land registration office), the new company now called Post.nl sued them, and lost. The judge has determined that starting February 2012, everybody may use the postcode database for free, Gelderlander writes.

Similarly map makers Falkplan lost a lawsuit against the government where the latter published map data via freedom of information requests, Arnoud Engelfriet writes. Falkplan’s angle seems to have been to disallow competition, plain and simple.

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October 22, 2011

Phone companies may not let thugs force teenagers to buy subscriptions

Filed under: General,Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:03 pm

A type of crime that I had not heard of before is that Dutch teenagers are being forced by peers to buy them expensive mobile phone subscriptions. Back in February consumer watchdog show Kassa reported that this sort of thing happens on a large scale.

Stores that sell these subscriptions tend to close their eyes to this problem. Arnoud Engelfriet reported two weeks ago that in a surprising verdict, a judge said that even though they are not a party to the crime, telecom companies can still not hold the victims to these crimes to the contracts they entered into.

An eighteen year old girl from Rotterdam was forced under threat of violence to enter into several contracts with KPN subsidiary Telfort. Dutch law says that if you entered a contract under threat, you can rescind the contract. The court also weighed heavily that forcing teenagers to buy cellphones and mobile subscriptions is a common enough practice that Telfort should have been suspicious, especially now the victim bought five subscriptions at five different stores in a single day, which is uncommon.

(Photo by Macinate, some rights reserved)

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June 29, 2011

Six things you should know about the Dutch cookie law

Filed under: IT by Branko Collin @ 8:12 am

There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around about the fresh Dutch (Internet) cookie law, so Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet set out to dispel the myths in a few excellent articles.

1. First this. The Dutch call their cookie law ‘cookiewet’ instead of ‘koekjeswet’ in spite of the Dutch origins of the English word. (The oo sound is spelled oe in Dutch.)

Says Arnoud (and I paraphrase):

2. Other ways than invasive pop-ups are OK to ask permission to plant cookies. A checkbox on a profile page, a central register, and even browser settings can be used to get and store permission. You are even allowed to use cookies for which you did not ask permission to store the fact that you got permission for other cookies.

(more…)

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June 26, 2011

Following your competitor’s Twitter followers is now legal

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 3:52 pm

Two weeks ago the court in Amsterdam held that trying to get your competitor’s Twitter followers to follow you is indeed perfectly legal.

Mediavacature.nl (which means ‘mediajob.nl’) had asked the court to stop mediavacatures.nl from abusing their trademark. The court ruled that trying to hijack your competitor’s followers is not illegal per se (PDF, Dutch):

4.10 Twitter

The defendants admit that the Twitter account @mediavacatures is being used to follow customers of the plaintiff on Twitter. Twitter is all about following and being followed. Furthermore all data on Twitter are public. Following the followers of a competitor can therefore not be seen as an illegal act per se. What is more, profiting of somebody else’s product, effort, knowledge or insight is not illegal by itself, even if this harms the other party. This only becomes illegal if a Twitter user (intentionally or otherwise) causes confusion with the general public.

Unsurprisingly the court ended up finding for the plaintiff, but the defendant did not have to turn over their Twitter account, domain name and brand, as they were no longer allowed to keep using them anyway. The defendants call themselves MV Jobs Media now.

At Arnoud Engelfriet’s blog somebody claiming to work for Media Vacature (plaintiff) pointed out that the Twitter claim was just a small part of their set of claims.

(Illustration: Twitter logo. Link: De Pers.)

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May 25, 2011

Calling James Sharpe a ‘porn baron’ is a bad, bad thing, judge says

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:25 pm

Former parliamentarian James Sharpe of the right-wing extremist Freedom Party (PVV) won an injunction against free newspaper Spits last week.

Spits is no longer allowed to call James Sharpe a ‘porn baron’. The epithet is ‘biased and unnecessarily hurtful’, internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet alleges.

One imagines the porn industry will be elated to see itself officially disassociated from Sharpe by a court of law.

Sharpe, son of a black immigrant and married to a Romanian woman, won a seat in parliament on a platform of hatred against immigrants, but resigned his seat when it became clear that he had lied about his Hungarian porn empire having a run-in with the law. This was during a time when Freedom Party front man (and single member) Geert Wilders still tried to get rid of representatives with a shady past—until he realised that this way he would soon be running out of viable candidates.

(Image: the Freedom Party logo. Any association with the logo of the Dutch Nazi party is, I am sure, as coincidental as flying the Dutch Nazi party flag.)

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February 28, 2011

Copyright vigilantes Brein seize servers illegally

Filed under: Online,Technology by Branko Collin @ 8:46 am

Dutch MPAA representatives Brein have broken the law by removing computer equipment worth hundreds of thousands of euro without a court order, law professor Ton Jongbloed told Tweakers.net last Tuesday. Brein seized 8 servers from hosting provider Al Transa last January.

The Brein foundation claims that the servers contained the warez site SWAN, although its not clear how it reasons that this makes it OK to break the law. Owner Craig Salmond says he will report the foundation to the police for theft, unless Brein gives back his hardware and offers a formal apology. His lawyer added that computervredebreuk, illegal hacking of a computer would also be a possible charge. Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet sees a charge of fraud as more likely to lead to a conviction, whereas the lawyers of IT en Recht are putting their money on a charge of vigilantism.

According to Webwereld, Brein gained the ability to log in to Salmond’s servers before they took the computers. Engelfriet thinks a charge of theft is unlikely to stick, as the maintainer of the 8 computers, another provider called Worldstream, voluntarily handed the machines over to Brein.

On a totally unrelated note, in December 2010 a judge decided to keep a 16-year-old script kiddie another two weeks in jail (by now he has been released) after he allegedly had hacked websites of MasterCard and Visa in retaliation for their treatment of Wikileaks front man Julian Assange. Call it a hunch, but I have severe doubts that we will ever hear of Brein manager Tim Kuik receiving a similar treatment at the hands of his good buddies at the Justice department. I doubt he will even ever spend a second in jail, at least not for copyright related matters. He just doesn’t fit the profile, never mind that the wealthy Brein foundation is in a much better position to make the prosecutor look silly than a gormless teenage high school student is.

(Photo by Malene Thyssen, some rights reserved)

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November 17, 2010

Copyright collection agency to charge for embedding after all

Filed under: Film,General,Music,Online by Orangemaster @ 7:57 pm
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In December 2009, after a wave of criticism from the media and beyond, Dutch copyright collection agency Buma/Stemra (B/S) decided to back off on its plans to make people pay for embedded music streams. However, today they announced that they will go ahead with their plans after all. According to B/S logic, embedding music is another form of ‘rebroadcasting’, which require licences. Buma/Stemra will start charging for music streams and video streams like YouTube, all of which will be confirmed soon. According to Tweakers, last year the projected rates for embedding videos with music were lower than embedding music streams — why, nobody knows.

They also say they won’t bug private persons, just companies. We’ll see.

In other copright news, a court in The Hague has ruled that downloading copyrighted material without permission of the rights holder is permitted as long as it’s a copy for home use. There was some doubt as to how copyright law should be interpreted on this issue, but not anymore. Read more about it in Dutch from our friendly neighbourhood Internet legal expert, Arnoud Engelfriet.

(Link: tweakers)

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August 31, 2010

Farmer paints religious slogan red to avoid fine

Filed under: Religion by Orangemaster @ 8:17 am

Back in July we posted about the Council of State which decided that farmer Joop van Ooijen had to remove the text “Jezus redt” (Jesus saves) from his roof or be fined 15,000 euro. (Feel free to read the legal take on this from Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet in the comments of the link above.)

Nothwithstanding all the legal arguments and the appeals, my television zapping habit procured me with a few minutes of the farmer explaining to a talk show host that he was summoned to remove ‘the white roof tiles’ from his roof. Cut to the farmer’s son at the hardware store buying red car paint, and voilà , they painted over the roof tiles so it’s not white anymore and can still be read.

(Public domain photo by Wikipedia user Apdency)

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