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On 24 June 2010, the European Commission issued a set of reasoned opinions to 12 member states (Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, and Slovenia) requesting that they proceed with updating their national broadcasting legislation in order to bring it into compliance with the Audiovisual Media Service (AVMS) Directive. The Directive, which replaced the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1989 (as amended), was adopted in December 1997 with the intention of bringing the EU’s broadcasting rules up to speed with the digital age. The...

The Hague District Court issued a judgment in preliminary proceedings on 2 June 2010 in the case of FTD BV v Eyeworks Film & TV Drama BV. The case concerned the role played by the defendant FTD in the downloading of copyright material from Usenet. FTD provides a service through which users can easily find and download Usenet files. To that end, FTD provides access to a computer application (the FTD application) with which users can share information about files, including copyright-protected works, stored in Usenet servers. The main question examined by the judge involved the extent to which this...

The Onafhankelijke Post en Telecommunicatie Autoriteit (Independent Post and Telecommunications Authority - OPTA) has published its final rules and tariffs for Holland’s two largest cable operators, UPC and Ziggo. Already on 22 December 2009, the European Commission stated that it had no comments on the draft version of the decision by OPTA (see IRIS 2010-2: 1/3). Now OPTA has published a slightly amended version of its decision. Last year, Holland’s four largest cable operators were labeled as having significant market power by OPTA. However, OPTA imposed a ‘Wholesale Line Rental - Cable’ obligation...

On 29 September 2009, the Gerechtshof Amsterdam (Amsterdam Court of Appeal) finalised its interlocutory judgment of 24 February 2009. The court found a regulatory clause prohibiting the placement of satellite dishes on vacation homes to be unfair and unreasonable under Dutch private law. The final judgment came after a separate hearing with the parties. In that hearing, the parties were given the opportunity to give their opinions on the question of whether in this case the internet could function as a satisfactory alternative to satellite dishes. The case involved a dispute between a company that...

On 19 December 2009 the implementation of Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) in the Media Act and the Tobacco Act was made official in the Netherlands. The bill for this implementing act was accepted by the Tweede Kamer, the lower chamber of the Dutch Parliament, on 30 June 2009 and by the Eerste Kamer, the first chamber of the Dutch Parliament, on 8 December 2009. The AVMSD, the successor to the Television without Frontiers Directive, introduced the term ‘audiovisual media service’ as its central concept. The goal of the Directive was to create a modern (technically neutral) and harmonised...