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On 13 October 2014, the State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science wrote a 25-page letter to the House of Representatives reporting the cabinet’s plans to strengthen the Dutch public television broadcasting system. The public broadcasting system has been the object of large budget cuts since 2013 and will have to merge from 21 to eight public broadcasting organisations before 2016. According to the state secretary, the public broadcaster has to produce more innovative and distinctive television programmes to be able to stay relevant in a changing media landscape. In his letter, the state...

On 10 April 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in the Stichting Thuiskopie case that Article 5(2)(b) of the Copyright Directive does not apply to private copying from an illegal source (see IRIS 2014-6/4). Article 5(2) (b) allows Member States to create a private copying exception, provided that the rightholders receive a fair compensation. In the Netherlands, a levy for private copying was previously intended to cover both copying from a legal, as well as from an illegal source. As it has become clear that that system was not in accordance with European law, the Dutch Minister...

On 18 November 2014, the Commissariaat voor de Media (Dutch Media Authority - CvdM) imposed a EUR 160,000 penalty on TV10 B.V (Disney) for exceeding the maximum advertising time on the commercial broadcasting channel Disney XD. The maximum time for broadcasting commercials or teleshopping programmes on television is 12 minutes per hour, according to Article 3.8 of the Dutch Media Law (Mediawet 2008). Disney repeatedly exceeded this time by up to 15 minutes and 59 seconds of advertising during the months of November and December 2013. Disney admitted exceeding the time, but claimed that the violations...

On 7 November 2014, the District Court of The Hague declared Dutch musician Honzy guilty of making death threats to politician Geert Wilders through a music video. The court sentenced the musician to a suspended prison sentence and, inter alia, ordered the musician to remove the video from his YouTube account. The video was first published on the musician’s YouTube account in March 2014. In the video, an actor wearing a blonde wig is dragged out of his office by two men wearing balaclavas. The men in balaclavas cover the actor’s head with a bag, put him on his knees and press a gun against his...

On 15 July 2014, the Dutch authority for consumers and markets (Autoriteit Consument en Markt) (ACM) imposed an order for periodic penalty payments on the Dutch public broadcaster NPO (Nederlandse Publieke Omroep) (see IRIS 2014-8/33). The NPO placed tracking cookies on end-user devices without correctly informing the end-user. Therefore, according to the ACM, the requisite consent for the placing of the tracking cookies was not in accordance with Article 11.7a of the Dutch telecommunications act (Telecommunicatiewet) and the Dutch data protection act (Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens). In order...