In the fight against the unauthorised sharing of copyright protected material, aka piracy, Dutch Internet Service Providers have been summoned by courts to block their subscribers' access to The Pirate Bay (TPB) and related sites. This paper studies the effectiveness of this approach towards online copyright enforcement, using both a consumer survey and a newly developed non-infringing technology for BitTorrent monitoring. While a small group of respondents download less from illegal sources or claim to have stopped, and a small but significant effect is found on the distribution of Dutch peers, no lasting net impact is found on the percentage of the Dutch population downloading from illegal sources.

The survey deals with the acquisition and consumption of music, films, series, books and games through the various legal and illegal channels that exist nowadays. The illegal channels studied are downloading and streaming from illegal sources (including via dedicated technical devices), and streamripping. The study was made possible by financial support from Google and builds on previous studies by IViR and Ecorys for the Dutch Government and the European Commission. In the latter, a comparable survey was used in six European countries, as a result of which time trends can be studied and there is the unique opportunity to follow a few thousand respondents over time. For the countries outside Europe, such a comparison over time is not possible. The study aims (i) to provide factual information about the state of authorised and unauthorised acquisition and consumption of content; (ii) to assess the underlying motives and mechanisms and the link with enforcement measures and legal supply; (iii) to assess the effect of online piracy on consumption from legal sources. Legal analysis Comparative legal research was performed on the basis of questionnaires on the legal status of online copyright infringement and enforcement, completed by legal experts in the 13 countries. It was found that, despite some legal uncertainty, the majority of acts studied are qualified as direct copyright infringement by users or give rise to liability for intermediaries. Moreover, ISPs are often subject to injunctions and duties of care even when they benefit from safe harbours. On the whole, copyright holders have a vast arsenal of legal

Fifteen OECD countries, ten of which EU members, have regulation for fixing the price of printed books. At least eight of these have extended such regulation to e-books. This article investigates the cultural and economic arguments as well as the legal context concerning a fixed price for e-books and deals with the question of how the arguments for and against retail price maintenance for e-books should be weighted in the light of the evidence. It concludes that while the evidence in defence of a fixed price for printed books is slim at best, the case for a fixed price for e-books is weaker still while the legal acceptability within EU law is disputable. Against this background, introducing a fixed price for e-books is ill-advised.

Online stores can present a different price to each customer. Such algorithmic personalised pricing can lead to advanced forms of price discrimination based on the characteristics and behaviour of individual consumers. We conducted two consumer surveys among a representative sample of the Dutch population (N=1233 and N=1202), to analyse consumer attitudes towards a list of examples of price discrimination and dynamic pricing. A vast majority finds online price discrimination unfair and unacceptable, and thinks it should be banned. However, some pricing strategies that have been used by companies for decades are almost equally unpopular. We analyse the results to better understand why people dislike many types of price discrimination.

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