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On 2 May 2003, the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (Dutch Supreme Court ­ HR) adopted a decision in the so-called Breekijzer case (see IRIS 2000-2: 7), in which it upheld a court decision to impose a ban on a broadcast and broadened the definition of "portrait" under the Auteurswet (Dutch Copyright Act ­ Aw). Breekijzer is a television programme that claims to help individual consumers in their disputes with companies or governments by using a "hold-up" method, in which the presenter visits companies, and films and interviews people representing the company without their prior consent. In this case,...

The Dutch first league football clubs are and remain the sole owners of the broadcasting rights to their home matches. The Dutch Supreme Court decided this in a judgment of 23 May 2003. The Dutch national football organization KNVB brought the matter in question before the Supreme Court claiming the existence of a joint ownership (for itself and the individual clubs) of the broadcasting rights to first league matches. KNVB argued that its organization of the league and the playing of matches in the league by the clubs justified the granting to itself and to the clubs of a right of intellectual...

On 4 September 2003, the Den Haag Court of Appeal ruled that Dutch journalist Karin Spaink did not act unlawfully by publishing on her web-site parts of works owned by the Church of Scientology. The present decision reverses the judgment of the Den Haag District Court of 9 June 1999 (see IRIS 1999-7: 3), which is widely regarded as a landmark decision on Internet Service Provider (ISP) liability for copyright infringement. The District Court ruling set the standard that ISPs should remove hosted material if they receive a notification that hosted material is infringing and they cannot doubt the...

On 6 June 2003 the Dutch Broadcasting Organisation (NOS) lost an appeal before the Supreme Court in its case against the daily newspaper Telegraaf. NOS tried for years to prevent the Telegraaf from using and publishing NOS 's broadcasting schedules in a weekly magazine, claiming this infringed its intellectual property rights. Although the Supreme Court accepts that the broadcasting schedules are protected by the Dutch pseudo-copyright for non-original works, the Court states that the competition law aspects of the case will be decisive (see also IRIS 1998-4: 12) and that these set aside the intellectual...

On 6 August 2003, the Afdeling Bestuursrechtspraak Raad van State (Dutch Supreme Court in administrative proceedings ­ ABRvS) overruled the judgment of the Rechtbank Amsterdam (the Court of Amsterdam) of 20 June 2002, and annulled the decision of the Commissariaat voor de Media (Media Authority ­ CvdM) of 5 February 2002, in which it claimed jurisdiction over the television channels RTL4 and RTL5. Since the beginning of the 1990s, RTL4 and RTL5 have been broadcast by a daughter company of the Luxembourg broadcasting organisation CLT under the latter's broadcasting licence. In 1995, the aforementioned...