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On 26 September 2017, the District Court of Amsterdam dismissed a complaint against a well-known Dutch crime reporter for allegedly unlawful statements made on the television programme RTL Boulevard. The lawsuit was also directed at the producer of the programme, Fremantlemedia Netherlands BV. The claimant in the case writes and publishes information about crimes in several media outlets. One of the crimes he commented on was the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1999. The claimant had an alternative reading of the case, and amongst other things, argued that the person convicted of these...

On 29 September 2017, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the claim of the telecom company Pretium to oblige the broadcaster Tros to hand over unedited hidden camera footage would be an impermissible restriction on the right to freedom of speech (see IRIS 2015-7/23). The decision relates to the question of the extent to which hidden camera footage falls within the scope of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), and whether an order to hand over audiovisual material may be rejected if the desired evidence can be obtained by other means. In 2008, Tros aired an episode of the...

On 6 July 2017, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, DPA), published a draft decision on the lawfulness of personal data processing proposed by Dutch FilmWorks B.V. (DFW). DFW had notified the DPA last March of its intention to collect and further process personal data for the purpose of the online enforcement of DFW’s copyright. Because DFW plans to process data without informing data subjects, Article 31(1)(b) of the Dutch Data Protection Act requires prior investigation by the DPA. With its decision, the DPA plans to declare the proposed processing lawful (for a...

In a notable judgment concerning preventive censorship and broadcasting, on 17 August 2017, the District Court of Midden-Nederland ruled that the Dutch public broadcasting association BNN/VARA may broadcast an episode of the YouTube documentary show #BOOS (Dutch for “angry”). The show aims to solve consumer complaints, mostly from young people. In the episode in question, the presenter confronted a landlord with complaints from his student tenants. The confrontation resulted in a fight which left the presenter suffering from a broken jaw. The landlord requested an injunction to prevent the documentary...

On 12 May 2017, the District Court of Amsterdam ruled that not only serious media, but also media of an ironic nature can rely upon the quotation exception to copyright. The case concerned a Dutch news website, 925.nl, which publishes ironic articles. In one of these articles, the website discussed the takeover of Sapph Intimates B.V., a lingerie webshop that went bankrupt in 2011 and that used the claimant’s photograph of the former Olympic swimmer Inge de Bruijn in swimwear on their poster. The poster with the claimant’s photograph was therefore also shown in the ironic article by the news website....