Netherlands

[NL] Subtitles Website Shut Down

IRIS 2004-3:1/28

Lisanne Steenmeijer

Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam

By order of the OM (the Dutch Public Prosecutions Department), the FIOD-ECD (the Dutch Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service) shut down the Dutch web-site ondertitels.nl. The initiative to have the web-site shut down was taken by Stichting BREIN, the Foundation for the Protection of Rights of the Entertainment Industry in the Netherlands. Subtitles ancillary to over 5,000 films were available on the web-site in many languages and could be used in copied films. BREIN reports that the web-site was visited by over 40,000 users a day and that over 3,500,000 subtitles were downloaded from the site. By publishing the subtitles on the Internet without permission of the rightsholders, the web-site was infringing copyrights extensively. The author of the web-site has been charged with illegally publishing copyright material.