Dutch copyright law
Encyclopedia
Dutch copyright law grants exclusive rights to the author
of a work of literature
, science
or art
. It was originally intended to cover books, but today it applies to many other materials including film
s, recorded music
and visual art.
Auteursrecht includes exclusive publishing
rights and allows the author to make and sell copies of their work. It also includes the exclusive right to make products derived from the copyrighted work and to publicly display the work (or to grant permission
to do so).
This is normally recorded in a license
contract
between someone who has created a copyrighted work and someone who wishes to use that work. Unlike patent
s, which grant monopolierecht ("monopoly right") on invention
s, copyrights only apply to specific creative manifestations of one or more idea
s. Copyrights, however, can be bought and sold.
Generally, the owner of a copy of a copyrighted product
can do with the copy as they please, even without actual ownership of the copyright, provided no copies are made and the product is not modified. Those who acquire modified copies from the copyright holder are also bound by these limitations.
There are some limits on what the owner of a copy can do with it. For example, public displays of the creative work are regarded as a form of copying. However, both Dutch
and Belgian
law allow for citaatrecht (quotation
right). This allows the use of portions of a copyrighted work under a strict set of conditions. Quotation rights are more limited and demarcated than the concept of fair use
.
created at work. Artists and musician
s (not just the company with distribution rights) are also granted the right of resale, which means they are entitled to a royalty
each time a copy of the work is published or exhibited. This is known as naburige rechten (literally "neighboring rights
").
Auteursrechten, like the French
idea of "droits d'auteur", implies not only legal but also moral rights
. An author
is theoretically given, in addition to the right of ownership, the right to be recognized for the work rather than being criticized for it. Regardless of whether property
rights are allocated to the publisher or to the author, the author retains this moral right.
work. Great Britain
was the first to change this in 1710 with the Statute of Anne
, which stated that authors, not publishers, had the right to claim a monopoly on the work. It also entailed protection for buyer
s of printed work in that publishers were no longer allowed to control the use of sold works. Furthermore, it limited exclusive rights to 28 years, after which the work or works would be released to the public domain
.
The Berne Convention
in 1886 first settled the recognition of copyrights between sovereign
nation
s. Under the Berne Convention the right of ownership (eigendomsrecht in Dutch) was automatically granted to every creative work. The author no longer needed to register the work, and was not required to apply for copyright coverage.
The Berne Convention is still in effect today. When a work is finished (defined as being written or recorded on a physical medium), the author automatically receives all exclusive rights for that work as well as derivative
s, unless and until the author explicitly renounces those rights or the copyright expires. The expiration time differs from country to country, but according to the Berne Convention the minimum time is the lifetime of the author plus 50 years. In the Netherlands the term is 70 years after the death of the author.
treaties
concerning copyright, including:
There are also many other treaties that settle specific parts of copyright. Examples are the European Directive on Copyright Protection of Software (Europese Richtlijn op de Auteursrechtelijke Bescherming van Software) and the European Directive on Neighboring Rights (Europese Richtlijn op de Naburige Rechten).
In the Netherlands there is no copyright at all on the text of law
s and court
rulings; these government
al works can be accessed at all times by anyone for any purpose. However, some publishers of legal texts and court rulings do claim copyrights on the form in which they present the texts.
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
of a work of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
or art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
. It was originally intended to cover books, but today it applies to many other materials including film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
s, recorded music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
and visual art.
Auteursrecht includes exclusive publishing
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...
rights and allows the author to make and sell copies of their work. It also includes the exclusive right to make products derived from the copyrighted work and to publicly display the work (or to grant permission
Permission
Permission, in philosophy, is the attribute of a person whose performance of a specific action, otherwise ethically wrong or dubious, would thereby involve no ethical fault. The term "permission" is more commonly used to refer to consent...
to do so).
This is normally recorded in a license
License
The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...
contract
Contract
A contract is an agreement entered into by two parties or more with the intention of creating a legal obligation, which may have elements in writing. Contracts can be made orally. The remedy for breach of contract can be "damages" or compensation of money. In equity, the remedy can be specific...
between someone who has created a copyrighted work and someone who wishes to use that work. Unlike patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s, which grant monopolierecht ("monopoly right") on invention
Invention
An invention is a novel composition, device, or process. An invention may be derived from a pre-existing model or idea, or it could be independently conceived, in which case it may be a radical breakthrough. In addition, there is cultural invention, which is an innovative set of useful social...
s, copyrights only apply to specific creative manifestations of one or more idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s. Copyrights, however, can be bought and sold.
Generally, the owner of a copy of a copyrighted product
Product (business)
In general, the product is defined as a "thing produced by labor or effort" or the "result of an act or a process", and stems from the verb produce, from the Latin prōdūce ' lead or bring forth'. Since 1575, the word "product" has referred to anything produced...
can do with the copy as they please, even without actual ownership of the copyright, provided no copies are made and the product is not modified. Those who acquire modified copies from the copyright holder are also bound by these limitations.
There are some limits on what the owner of a copy can do with it. For example, public displays of the creative work are regarded as a form of copying. However, both Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
and Belgian
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
law allow for citaatrecht (quotation
Quotation
A quotation or quote is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by quotation marks.A quotation can also refer to the repeated use of units of any...
right). This allows the use of portions of a copyrighted work under a strict set of conditions. Quotation rights are more limited and demarcated than the concept of fair use
Fair use
Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...
.
Difference between copyright and 'auteursrechten'
Aside from those mentioned above, there are a few legal differences between auteursrechten and copyrights. One noticeable difference is that auteursrechten grants more rights to employees over intellectual and other propertyProperty
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
created at work. Artists and musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
s (not just the company with distribution rights) are also granted the right of resale, which means they are entitled to a royalty
Royalties
Royalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...
each time a copy of the work is published or exhibited. This is known as naburige rechten (literally "neighboring rights
Related rights
Related rights is a term in copyright law, used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". The term neighbouring rights is exactly equivalent, and is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Related rights in civil law are similar to authors' rights, but are not connected...
").
Auteursrechten, like the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
idea of "droits d'auteur", implies not only legal but also moral rights
Rights
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory...
. An author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
is theoretically given, in addition to the right of ownership, the right to be recognized for the work rather than being criticized for it. Regardless of whether property
Property
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
rights are allocated to the publisher or to the author, the author retains this moral right.
History
Historically, governments issued monopolierechten (monopoly-rights) to publishers for the sale of printedPrinting
Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....
work. Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
was the first to change this in 1710 with the Statute of Anne
Statute of Anne
The Statute of Anne was the first copyright law in the Kingdom of Great Britain , enacted in 1709 and entering into force on 10 April 1710...
, which stated that authors, not publishers, had the right to claim a monopoly on the work. It also entailed protection for buyer
Buyer
When someone gets characterised by their role as buyer of certain assets, the term "buyer" gets new meaning:A "buyer" or merchandiser is a person who purchases finished goods, typically for resale, for a firm, government, or organization...
s of printed work in that publishers were no longer allowed to control the use of sold works. Furthermore, it limited exclusive rights to 28 years, after which the work or works would be released to the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
.
The Berne Convention
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland in 1886.- Content :...
in 1886 first settled the recognition of copyrights between sovereign
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...
nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
s. Under the Berne Convention the right of ownership (eigendomsrecht in Dutch) was automatically granted to every creative work. The author no longer needed to register the work, and was not required to apply for copyright coverage.
The Berne Convention is still in effect today. When a work is finished (defined as being written or recorded on a physical medium), the author automatically receives all exclusive rights for that work as well as derivative
Derivative
In calculus, a branch of mathematics, the derivative is a measure of how a function changes as its input changes. Loosely speaking, a derivative can be thought of as how much one quantity is changing in response to changes in some other quantity; for example, the derivative of the position of a...
s, unless and until the author explicitly renounces those rights or the copyright expires. The expiration time differs from country to country, but according to the Berne Convention the minimum time is the lifetime of the author plus 50 years. In the Netherlands the term is 70 years after the death of the author.
National laws and treaties
Copyright laws differ between countries. However, there are several internationalInternational copyright
While no creative work is automatically protected worldwide, there are international treaties which provide protection automatically for all creative works as soon as they are fixed in a medium...
treaties
Treaty
A treaty is an express agreement under international law entered into by actors in international law, namely sovereign states and international organizations. A treaty may also be known as an agreement, protocol, covenant, convention or exchange of letters, among other terms...
concerning copyright, including:
- The Berne ConventionBerne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic WorksThe Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland in 1886.- Content :...
, 1886 - The Universal Copyright ConventionUniversal Copyright ConventionThe Universal Copyright Convention , adopted at Geneva in 1952, is one of the two principal international conventions protecting copyright; the other is the Berne Convention....
, 1952 - The WIPO Copyright Treaty, 1996
- The WIPO Performances and Phonograms TreatyWIPO Performances and Phonograms TreatyThe WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty is an international treaty signed by the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization was adopted in Geneva on December 20, 1996...
, 1996 - The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property RightsAgreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property RightsThe Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is an international agreement administered by the World Trade Organization that sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property regulation as applied to nationals of other WTO Members...
(TRIPs) (which manages the rights concerning trade in intellectual property)
There are also many other treaties that settle specific parts of copyright. Examples are the European Directive on Copyright Protection of Software (Europese Richtlijn op de Auteursrechtelijke Bescherming van Software) and the European Directive on Neighboring Rights (Europese Richtlijn op de Naburige Rechten).
Misconceptions
There are many misconceptions about copyright laws in the Netherlands.- TrademarkTrademarkA trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
s and patentPatentA patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s, not copyrights, govern names and inventions. - Although copyright infringement is often compared to theftTheftIn common usage, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent. The word is also used as an informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, shoplifting and fraud...
, when something is stolen the owner no longer has access to the stolen property. - Copyright is granted automatically in countries such as the Netherlands that have signed the Berne Convention, meaning as soon as a person creates a work, it is covered by copyright. This means that technically it is not necessary to include copyright indicators such as "copyright © 2006." (However, such indicators are generally included for the sake of clarity.)
- The word "copyright" has no legal meaning in the Netherlands. Thus the phrase "op dit werk berust copyright" ("this work is covered by copyright") has no legal meaning. The correct phrase is "dit werk is auteursrechtelijk beschermd." The symbol © also has no legal meaning in the Netherlands.
- Anyone who has made a creative work has a copyright. An underexposedExposure (photography)In photography, exposure is the total amount of light allowed to fall on the photographic medium during the process of taking a photograph. Exposure is measured in lux seconds, and can be computed from exposure value and scene luminance over a specified area.In photographic jargon, an exposure...
, badly composed picture of the Eiffel TowerEiffel TowerThe Eiffel Tower is a puddle iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris. Built in 1889, it has become both a global icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world...
on a personal homepageHomepageA home page or homepage has various related meanings to do with web sites:* It most often refers to the initial or main web page of a web site, sometimes called the front page ....
is just as covered as a two meter tall print of a perfect photographPhotographA photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
of the same tower by a professional photographer. - Copyright is only granted to creative, original works. The creator of the work must have used some creativity or a certain creative decisionDecision makingDecision making can be regarded as the mental processes resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.- Overview :Human performance in decision terms...
must have been made. Creativity is a relative term, however, as this is a legal, not aesthetic, standard. PassportPassportA passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth....
photographs are an example of works that are not covered by copyright because they are produced in a standard way. Passport photographs are covered by portretrecht (portrait right). - An author can transfer a copyright to someone else using securitisatie, at which point the author receives the current valueValue (economics)An economic value is the worth of a good or service as determined by the market.The economic value of a good or service has puzzled economists since the beginning of the discipline. First, economists tried to estimate the value of a good to an individual alone, and extend that definition to goods...
of future copyright revenues at the time of public presentationPresentationPresentation is the practice of showing and explaining the content of a topic to an audience or learner. Presentations come in nearly as many forms as there are life situations...
. - Copyright lasts for a finite time, specifically 70 years after the death of the author. When a copyright expires the work become part of the public domainPublic domainWorks are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
. An author also can prematurely renounce a copyright. Expiration or termination of the copyright does not automatically mean the work can be freely copied and published. For example, portraitPortraitthumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
rights of the person depicted may still apply to portraits. - The author of a work always retains certain rights, even if the copyright is transferred or renounced: the right of the author to be mentioned in, on or near the work is the best example. These rights are called moral rights. These rights also last until 70 years after the death of the author.
Works of the government and laws and court rulings
In principle all works communicated to the public by or on behalf of the public authorities (government) are not copyright protected in the Netherlands, unless the copyright has been reserved explicitly, either in a general manner by law, decree or ordinance, or in a specific case by a notice on the work itself or at the communication to the public. This is regulated in Article 15b of the Copyright Act of 1912. This implies that programmes of the Netherlands Public Broadcasting service (they are public authorities just like the Silicose Oud-mijnwerkers foundation, see ABRS 30 November 1995, JB 1995/337) are not copyright protected.In the Netherlands there is no copyright at all on the text of law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
s and court
Court
A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...
rulings; these government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
al works can be accessed at all times by anyone for any purpose. However, some publishers of legal texts and court rulings do claim copyrights on the form in which they present the texts.
External links
- Copyright Act (Netherlands) (1912)
- Neighbouring Rights Act (Netherlands) (1993) (pdf of unofficial translation)