PR agencies and journalists alike have been screaming blue murder the past few days over the perceived consequences of the new anti-spam law. Laurens Verhagen of Nu.nl, the website known for never writing its own stories if it can help it, whines (Dutch) that “an unintended side-effect is that PR agencies are no longer allowed to send press releases.”

Other journalists cheer on the new law. NRC.next’s Ernst-Jan Pfauth hails the death of the press release (Dutch): “Press release are old-fashioned, unnecessary and often misused.”

But as the here-often-quoted Internet law specialist Arnoud Engelfriet explains at De Nieuwe Reporter, the law has a provision for e-mail addresses that have been explicitly designed for receiving bulk mails. Also, the spam prohibition only pertains to advertising, informative e-mails are not part of the law.

That means that from now on only advertisements dressed up as press releases are out, but I cannot imagine that even Laurens Verhagen would bemoan such an intended consequence.

A tempest in a teapot.

(Photo of a letterbox by Roy Parkhouse, some rights reserved.)

Collecting society Buma/Stemra is after Dutch bloggers now. Starting in 2010 you must cough up 130 euro for every six music videos you embed in your web page, according to Madbello (Dutch).

Buma/Stemra is a copyright collecting society for composers. It makes use of a feature of Dutch copyright law that says that negotiating licenses and royalties is too cumbersome for some forms of creative works, and that therefore collecting societies can be set up that charge bulk rates and pass on the money to the creators.

IT law specialists Arnoud Engelfriet and Kamiel Koelman are quick to dismiss B/S’ claims at Tweakers.net (Dutch). Both point out that embedding content on your web page is not necessarily a new publication of that content, and therefore B/S cannot charge money for it.

Dutch copyright law makes a distinction between the act of copying and the act of publishing. A famous lawsuit that highlights the difference between the two, and that went all the way to the Dutch High Council is Poortvliet vs. Hovener (Dutch, PDF). Hovener was a publisher who had an agreement to sell 13 reproductions of Poortvliet’s paintings as part of a calendar. Although Hovener did print the calendar, they then cut out the reproductions and sold them separately, pasted on cardboard and presumably at a much higher price. No copying took place, yet it was considered a new form of publication, and therefore infringement.

Engelfriet’s and Koelman’s reasoning are in my opinion unconvincing, but even more so I think B/S rates are through the roof. A rate of 13 cents per embedded video seems much more reasonable considering that videos embedded in blogs (with the rare exception perhaps for blogs where people come to listen to the music) only work to expose an audience to the embedded works.

UPDATE: Sign the petition: bumablog

A week before his 81st birthday, writer Simon Vinkenoog died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Amsterdam last night. Vinkenoog was a poet, a writer of novels, and a strong proponent of the legalization of soft drugs. In 2004, when poet laureate Gerrit Komrij prematurely handed in his resignation, Vinkenoog was elected to serve the interim, until Driek van Wissen could take over.

Here is my pathetic attempt at translating one of the poems Vinkenoog wrote while in office:

Pamphlet

Pamphlet or quick prayer,*
love poem or protest song,
provided it is experienced,
grows wings, becomes redemption.

Once doom makes room
– for courage,
everything you do
becomes a living greeting:

“All that moves
will stay in motion
Make or break
– there is no choice

Nothing remains,
everything will disappear
your life a fireworks
or not.”

*) Note from the translator: what, no word for schietgebed (emergency prayer) in the English language?!

(Photo: Martijn S., some rights reserved, photo ’shopped by me.)

No law or decree has ever been valid in this kingdom until after publication in the Staatsblad (laws) or Staatscourant (other government decisions with the force of law). That is, until July 1st of this year, when the paper editions of Staatsblad and Staatscourant were abandoned and a law came into force that allowed electronic publication of laws and decrees.

The Staatscourant was founded by the first Dutch King, Willem I, in 1814. Volkskrant reports that the king wasn’t shy of using this formal publication for political purposes, especially since it could compete cheaply with commercial newspapers.

With the official publications now taken care of by a website, bekendmaking.nl, Staatscourant and Staatsblad publisher SDU will continue with a printed weekly called SC that will focus on commentary on laws.

When faith healer Jomanda took to the stage yesterday for one of her sessions in Bergen op Zoom, Noord Brabant, she had a big sign with her that said “Raadpleeg altijd een arts” (”Always consult a physician”), an odd move perhaps for somebody who believes she is a healing medium between this world and ‘God’. On her website she even claims that “doctors merely apply the bandages, only God heals.” Jomanda was recently cleared from charges (Dutch) of contributing to comedy actress Sylvia Millecam’s death.

Millecam had been struggling with breast cancer and had been avoiding traditional medicine. The alternative ‘healers’ she sought out suggested that she merely had a bacterial infection, after which she died. The case against Jomanda and two ‘alternative doctors’ was unique in that for the first time a court held it had the authority to address the care duty of somebody who was not a legal care giver. Indeed, the court seems to take this for granted (Dutch).

The court considered it proven that Jomanda had violated her care duty, but cleared her of the charges because Millecam had also sought regular help during the time she consulted the medium, and that the medium merely had a “comforting” influence, not a decisive one. The justice department is appealing.

(Photo by Mike Locke, some rights reserved.)

Four years ago I wrote a piece for the Teleread blog called “Consumers won’t (multi)play.” It told about how telecom providers had lined up all these great packages that combined television, internet access, and telephony. No more hassle with double or triple contracts and bills, just one easy, clean, simple package from a single provider. And the consumer wouldn’t have it, for reasons that remained unclear.

Well, it appears that consumers have finally started to make the move towards a single bill, and I have been caught up in the drift. My internet access provider of many years sent me a rather threatening letter, telling me to get with the program or else… The situation there has been rather more convoluted than elsewhere. My provider offered ADSL before the phone company did (former monopolist KPN), and as a result its customers had to have a contract both with the internet provider, and the phone company (which provided the physical lines).

Later the provider somehow acquired the possibility to offer ADSL without forcing the customer to tango with KPN (I don’t know why, I presume this has to do with some sort of liberalisation of the phone lines), and now it understandably wants to move all its customers that couldn’t be arsed to go the single bill route. So this is the sugar with which they are trying to coax us: “If you don’t move, we’ll raise the price of your subscription.” Naturally, I have been checking out the competition.

Oddly enough, the competition doesn’t seem to be too eager to take me on as a new customer.

UPC offers a handy looking tool to select your package with a great promise: they’ll pay for the cheapest of the three services. But you don’t even have to click around to realize that it’s pretty much the price of the internet service you choose that determines the final cost. Still, you have to choose all the premium deluxe services with all the bells and whistles and free champagne and hookers for a year to get at a price that’s substantially higher than what you would pay at the competition. Wait, there’s some dirt on the screen. Hm, I cannot get it off. Would it be …? Yes, it’s the tiny print that informs of all the extra costs that add 50% to your bills for many moons to come.

All this dancing around the do to hide the true costs.

KPN, that good old phone company, also offers triple play, and they also dance around. They’ve got a couple of special offers lined up right now that make their Basic and Premium package look much better than their Lite package. Well, for the first three months that is. Again, what’s with the deception? Why not give everybody the premium service for three months, and the choice to switch back for free after that?

Telegraaf reports (Dutch) that a change in the Telecommunications law last Wednesday no longer allows contracts to be silently renewed without the customer’s explicit consent, and predicts this change is going to cause a price war in the telecom world. Price comparison whizz-kid Ben Woldring tells the paper consumers can save hundreds of euros a year. So far, I have not noticed any participant who seems to take this war seriously.

Illustration: UPC’s two-out-of-three picker always yields pretty much the same price depending on the internet component you choose.

Illustration: If KPN’s premium packages are cheaper than their Lite package, why do they offer the latter at all?

Anti-’piracy’ bureau BREIN, the Dutch equivalent of the infamous RIAA, scored its first kill last Saturday. Literally, I am afraid. During a raid on a market in Beverwijk, a 47-year-old man from Waalwijk accosted by the raiders died of a heart attack, reports Blik op Nieuws (Dutch). The police were presumably testing that the requisite taxes on empty CDs and DVDs had been paid, and were accompanied by a posse consisting of people from the FIOD (tax police) and the Thuiskopie and BREIN foundations.

Interestingly, the story of the police and of witnesses differ substantially, writes Noordhollands Dagblad (Dutch). According to the former, the man had a heart attack after running away from the merry band of official and self-appointed copyright hunters, after which the police tried to administer first aid. Witnesses however claim that the man did not run away, and that everybody just stood there, without helping the victim.

You have to wonder why private organizations like BREIN are even allowed to accompany the police on raids like this.

(Photo by Flickr user Sheep Purple, some rights reserved.)

Brenno de Winter needs your money to force the government to become transparent. On June 11, he will organize a benefit in Amsterdam of which the proceeds will go to this war chest.

During his recent attempts to figure out how many local governments are using so-called Free and Open Software, several of these governments have been actively conspiring to thwart De Winter’s efforts. They ‘forgot’ to send some of the required documents, billed him for their time, and 22 municipalities and three provinces outright refused him the documents they are obliged to send, forcing him to start a separate law suit against each one of them.

De Winter expects costs to run up to EUR 7,000, an amount he is unable to cough up himself. If you can spare some cash, you can send some his way to bank account 4241287 c/o Stichting Vrijschrift in Workum. You can also visit the benefit event at the Pick-up Club at the NDSM wharf in Amsterdam, which starts at 5:30 pm on Thursday, June 11, and which features an introduction to WOBing by De Winter, and a debate about transparency between journalists, hackers and civil servants.

I am an adviser to the Stichting Vrijschrift (Scriptum Libre in English) and can tell you they are legit. Their only weakness is their unwillingness to toot their own horn, so let me list some of their feats:

• Instrumental in defeating software patents in the EU
• Acquired financing for GPS devices for the Dutch chapter of Open Street Map
• Working to convince the government of the benefits of open educational materials, such as text books that any teacher can edit and improve.

(More info at Iusmentis (Dutch). About the picture, is it normal that spray bottles like this one have an extra grip for a sixth finger?)

Remember that story about the website that lost a lawsuit due to how Google summarized its contents in search results? Well, the judge’s opinion came in yesterday, and it gets even crazier.

What went on before? Miljoenhuizen.nl had a web page on which the words “Zwartepoorte” and “failliet” (bankrupt) appeared together, although totally unrelated. According to Zwartepoorte the Google summary of that page caused people to conclude that the company had gone bankrupt, and so it asked Miljoenhuizen.nl to change the webpage to undo that impression. The latter refused and the former sued.

Miljoenhuizen.nl’s owner had—let me quote the court—”organized his website in such a manner that it scored “high” in Google, [so] the defendant has a responsibility in this matter.” In other words because the defendant ranked high in the search engine, he lost the case. He probably never helped himself by telling the judge how easy and trivial it is to change the page in a way that Google would no longer produce the damaging text.

Some good news for Miljoenhuizen.nl though is that it managed to net Solv (Dutch), the respectable internet law firm of amongst others Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm—he who once convinced a court that Kazaa was legal, although by then the filesharing company had fled to Australia only to be convicted there, perhaps because lesser legal minds roam the steppe of Southland.

(Full verdict here (Dutch, PDF). Link: Iusmentis. Joris van Hoboken, expert on the confluence of law and search engines, has an opinion in English.)

If the case of car dealer Zwartepoort against website Miljoenhuizen.nl has been in the news before, it can only have been as the sort of easily mocked example of how some folks start lawsuits over really anything and everything, no matter how trivial and unwinnable their cases are. But now Zwartepoorte have gone and won theirs. When you searched Google for the company name, you would get amongst others a result from Miljoenhuizen.nl seemingly explaining the car dealer had gone bankrupt. You know the type:

Full name: Zwartepoorte. Specialty: BMW … This company has gone bankrupt.

These abstracts are machine generated. Google takes disparate phrases from a website and combines them into an abstract. Miljoenhuizen.nl obviously feels that the wrong people have been sued. Miljoenhuizen.nl told De Telegraaf (Dutch): “If the search result were to imply or insinuate that Zwartepoorte has gone bust, it would be Google’s responsibility, not ours.” I would take that a step further and say that nobody should have been sued in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what reasoning judge Sj. A. Rullman will come up with to explain her judgment. Meanwhile, I am waiting with trepidation to be sued by BMW car dealers, as I have my own story of the power of Google to tell. The last few weeks of December I got a constant stream of phone calls from people wishing to buy a nice shiny Beamer. My initials are B.M.W., and as it turns out I used to be the first link people would find when they googled for “BMW Amsterdam,” displayed prominently as part of Google Business with a map and a phone number. It got so bad that I stopped answering the phone, and started the message on my machine with the statement that “I am not a BMW dealer.” I must has cost some poor sod a lot of lost business that way.

Update: fixed type “Miljoenenhuizen.nl” to “Miljoenhuizen.nl.” Thanks, Nico.

Link: Iusmentis (Dutch). Photo by Gyver Chang, some rights reserved.