Short as this part of the interview is, it offers several interesting insights.

Assume for a second that Van Kooten is fully aware of all the intricacies of Dutch copyright law. And let’s not beat around the bush about the legality of downloading: in the Netherlands it is legal to download, but not to upload. The moral conclusion to be drawn with regards to P2P is then either that uploading is good, because downloading is legal; or that downloading is bad, because uploading is illegal. We will assume that Van Kooten takes the latter position.

What should and what should not be legal, then, depends on the quality of the work being downloaded! After all, taping is OK, because by its very nature it is of a lesser quality than the masters of the works. (There were, by the way, radio shows where the DJ tried not to talk through a song, so Van Kooten’s suggestion that you could not copy entire songs is misleading, at least for some songs.)

Now assume that Van Kooten is unaware of all the intricacies of copyright law; then he is just advocating that the law applies to others, but not to him and his friends. An opinion that is not rare, it seems, but in a sense natural; everybody holds such opinions. The question with these kinds of things, as always, is: should we educate the people (the RIAAA/Brein way, by sueing or prosecuting them), or should we change the law? If we choose the latter, we are going to have a hard time convincing creators that they do not have an intrinsic right to what we are taking away from them.

There is also an interesting contrast between a line from the song and a sentence from the interview: “Everybody grabs what they can” versus “We used to tape the Soulshow from the radio”. Note how Van Kooten suggests that what they were doing had a very specific purpose. They were friends, buddies, peers, who were in the know about what was good (namely, The Soulshow); the filesharers on the other hand do not care what they download. They just grab what they can (in Dutch: ‘iedereen die graait maar raak’). They lack the well-developed taste Van Kooten and his friends used to determine what to copy and what not.

I find this a slightly cynical view. Not to mention that is hard to point to the actual damages caused by people who do not care what they download. Unless you hold the even more cynical view that these people would buy at random if they could not download. But perhaps I am just reading too much into a few selected sentences from an interview.