Media law in the Netherlands: which rules apply to what you publish

Media law in the Netherlands is not a single statute. It is the set of rules that governs what may be published and broadcast, drawn from article 7 of the Constitution, the Media Act (Mediawet 2008), the Copyright Act (Auteurswet), the defamation provisions of the Criminal Code, the general tort provision of the Civil Code, the GDPR, and directly applicable EU instruments such as the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act. Which of these applies depends on what you publish, on which channel, and about whom.

That fragmentation is the first thing to understand, because it explains most of the confusion in practice. The Media Act does not regulate newspapers. Defamation is enforced through the civil courts far more often than through the criminal ones. And a rule that binds a broadcaster may leave a website untouched, while a European regulation catches both. This article sets out which rule applies where, who supervises what, and where the practical risks sit for publishers, businesses and content creators.

What Dutch media law actually consists of

Article 7 of the Constitution contains the core guarantee. No prior permission may be required for publication: that is a prohibition on censorship, not on liability. Everyone remains responsible under the law for what they publish, after the fact. The provision distinguishes between the printed press, broadcasting and other means of expression, and it expressly excludes commercial advertising from its protection, which is why advertising can be regulated far more intensively than editorial content.

Alongside it, article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression and permits restrictions only where they are prescribed by law, pursue a legitimate aim and are necessary in a democratic society. Dutch courts apply that test directly, and in a dispute about a publication it usually carries more weight than the constitutional provision, because article 7 binds the legislature rather than resolving a conflict between two private parties.

Underneath those guarantees sit the operative rules. The Media Act 2008 regulates broadcasting, on-demand media services and video-sharing platforms. The Copyright Act governs the reuse of text, images, audio and video, and contains the portrait right. The Criminal Code criminalises defamation, libel, insult and, since 2024, doxing. The Civil Code provides the route that matters most in practice, through the general tort provision and the power to order a rectification. And the GDPR governs the personal data that journalism, marketing and platform operation inevitably involve.

The press is not regulated by the Media Act

This is the most persistent misunderstanding. Newspapers, magazines and their websites are not licensed, are not supervised by the Dutch Media Authority, and are not bound by the content or advertising rules of the Media Act. The press is subject to the general law: copyright, privacy, defamation, and the ordinary rules on unfair commercial practices where it advertises.

What does exist for the press is self-regulation. The Netherlands Press Council (Raad voor de Journalistiek) assesses complaints about journalistic conduct against professional standards and publishes reasoned findings. It cannot award damages, order a takedown or impose a penalty, and participation is voluntary. Its opinions carry moral and reputational weight and are sometimes referred to in court, but a complaint to the Council is not a substitute for a legal claim and does not interrupt any limitation period.

Who supervises what

The practical lesson is that supervision and enforcement are separate questions. A regulator can fine a broadcaster but cannot compensate the person who was defamed by it; a court can order a publication removed but does not police advertising standards across a sector. Most serious media disputes therefore run through the civil courts, frequently in summary proceedings where speed matters.

The Media Act: who falls under it and what it demands

The Media Act 2008 replaced the earlier broadcasting legislation and consolidated the rules for public and commercial media services. It regulates linear broadcasting, on-demand audiovisual services and, since the 2020 implementation of the amended Audiovisual Media Services Directive, video-sharing platforms as well. The obligations it imposes are content and advertising obligations rather than licensing hurdles for the written word: recognisable separation of advertising and editorial content, disclosure of sponsorship and product placement, restrictions on advertising around children’s programming, accessibility requirements, and a minimum share of European productions in on-demand catalogues.

The part of the Act that has changed most recently concerns individual creators. Commercial video-uploaders on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok fall under the supervision of the Dutch Media Authority where they operate a registered business, publish regularly and derive economic benefit from doing so. The follower threshold that originally limited this regime to very large accounts was abandoned on 16 June 2025, so the supervision now extends in principle to smaller commercial creators, with only the registration fee reserved for accounts above a size threshold. The substantive duties are the ones that matter: clear disclosure of advertising and sponsorship in the video and in its description, stricter rules where the content is aimed at minors, and a prohibition on product placement in content for children. Our article on influencer marketing in the Netherlands sets out how those duties work alongside the Dutch Advertising Code.

Publication and the individual

Most media disputes are not about regulation at all. They are about a publication that names someone. Two routes exist, and they run in parallel.

The criminal route is narrow. The Criminal Code makes it an offence to damage someone’s honour or reputation by alleging a specific fact with the intention of giving it publicity (smaad), to do so knowing the allegation is untrue (laster), and to insult a person in other ways (eenvoudige belediging). These are complaint offences in most circumstances, prosecution is uncommon, and the sentences are low. Since 1 January 2024 the Criminal Code also contains a separate offence of doxing: obtaining, disseminating or otherwise making available another person’s personal data with the intention of intimidating them, or of enabling someone else to do so. That provision was written for online conduct and does not require the data to be secret.

The civil route is where publications are actually challenged. A publication that is unlawful under the general tort provision of the Civil Code can be met with a claim for a takedown, a prohibition on repetition, damages including compensation for non-material loss, and a court-ordered rectification. Whether a publication is unlawful is decided by weighing the right to freedom of expression against the right to protection of honour, reputation and private life. Neither right takes precedence in the abstract; the court weighs the circumstances.

Dutch courts have long worked with a settled list of factors: the nature of the allegations and the seriousness of the consequences for the person concerned, the extent of the public interest served by the publication, the degree to which the allegations were supported by the factual material available at the time, the wording chosen, the reach of the publication, the conduct and public role of the person concerned, and whether that person was given an opportunity to respond before publication. That final point is the one publishers most often skip and most often regret: a serious allegation put to the subject in advance, with the response fairly reported, is far harder to attack.

Images have their own regime. The Copyright Act gives a person depicted in a portrait a right to oppose publication where they have a reasonable interest in doing so, and a stronger position again where the portrait was commissioned. Commercially exploitable popularity counts as a reasonable interest, which is why using someone’s likeness in advertising without agreement is a straightforward claim. The rules are set out in our guide to the portrait right in the Netherlands, and reputational claims are covered in our article on online defamation and reputation management.

Older publications raise a separate question. Under the GDPR a person may request erasure of personal data, and search engine operators may be required to de-index results where the interest in access no longer outweighs the individual’s interest, as the Court of Justice held in its 2014 judgment on the right to be forgotten. In the Netherlands such a request is directed to the controller first and can then be taken to the district court by petition. De-indexing does not remove the underlying article, which is a distinction claimants frequently miss.

Protection of journalistic sources

Source protection is statutory in the Netherlands. Since 1 October 2018 the Code of Criminal Procedure has given journalists and publicists a right to refuse to answer questions and to hand over material that would reveal a source, and it requires judicial authorisation before investigative powers are used against them. The right is not absolute: a court may set it aside where an overriding interest in a serious criminal case requires it, but the burden of demonstrating that lies with the authorities and the assessment is made by an investigating judge in advance rather than by the police at the door.

The Dutch legislation followed a series of rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, including a Grand Chamber judgment against the Netherlands in 2010 which held that an order compelling a publisher to surrender photographic material identifying sources required prior review by an independent body. The practical consequences for editorial practice are concrete: keep material capable of identifying a source separately, agree in advance who in the organisation may access it, and involve a lawyer at the moment of a demand rather than after compliance.

Platforms: the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act

Two EU regulations now do much of the work that national law used to do badly. The Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, has applied in full since 17 February 2024. It keeps the conditional liability exemption for hosting providers, who are not liable for user content unless they have actual knowledge of illegality and fail to act expeditiously, and it prohibits any general obligation to monitor. Around that core it builds procedure: a notice and action mechanism, a statement of reasons for every restriction imposed on a user, an internal complaint system, out-of-court dispute settlement, and heavier obligations for very large online platforms including risk assessments and researcher access.

The Netherlands implemented the enforcement side by an act adopted in early 2025, designating the Authority for Consumers and Markets as Digital Services Coordinator, with the Dutch data protection authority responsible where profiling and personal data are involved. In practice that means a complaint about an unlawful post now has two possible destinations: the platform’s own notice mechanism, backed by the ACM, and the civil court, which can still order a takedown and identify an anonymous poster. We set out the platform rules in more detail in our article on the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.

The European Media Freedom Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1083, has applied since 8 August 2025 and is the more recent development. It obliges member states to respect the editorial independence of media service providers and prohibits measures aimed at exposing journalistic sources, including the deployment of intrusive surveillance software against journalists other than in narrowly defined circumstances. It requires media service providers to make their ownership structure public and to report revenue received from state advertising. And it gives recognised media service providers a procedural position towards very large online platforms: before content from such a provider is removed on the ground of incompatibility with the platform’s terms, the provider must be notified and given a short window to respond, and complaints from such providers must be handled with priority.

Reusing content: copyright

Nothing in media law is invoked more often than copyright, and nothing is misunderstood more consistently. A work is protected without registration from the moment it is created, protection lasts for the life of the author and seventy years thereafter, and the absence of a copyright notice means nothing. Reuse therefore requires either permission or a statutory exception.

The exceptions that matter for media are narrow and conditional. The right of quotation permits use of a part of a work in a review, a report or a comparable context, provided the work has been lawfully made public, the quotation is proportionate to the purpose, the context is genuinely one of discussion of the work, and the source and the author’s name are stated. The press exception permits the taking over of news items from other media where reuse has not been expressly reserved, which most publishers now reserve as a matter of course. Neither exception permits republishing a photograph because it illustrates the topic well, which is the single most common infringement in online publishing and the one that generates the most claims.

Linking is a special case. In its 2016 judgment in GS Media v Sanoma, a case that came from the Netherlands, the Court of Justice held that posting a hyperlink to a work published elsewhere without the rightholder’s consent can amount to a communication to the public where the person posting knew or ought to have known that the publication was unlawful, and that such knowledge is presumed where the link is posted for profit. For a commercial publisher this reverses the intuition that a link is always safe. Our article on when online content is public deals with the boundaries in more detail.

The EU directive on copyright in the digital single market was implemented in Dutch law in 2021 and added, among other things, a related right for press publishers and a regime for content-sharing platforms. Manipulated audiovisual material raises questions of its own, which we address in our article on deepfakes under Dutch law.

Advertising and commercial communication

Because article 7 of the Constitution excludes commercial advertising from its protection, this is the most heavily regulated part of media output. Three layers apply at once. The Civil Code prohibits misleading and unlawful comparative advertising and contains the unfair commercial practices regime, which allows both competitors and consumers to act, and which the ACM enforces with administrative powers. The Media Act adds the disclosure, separation and product placement rules for services that fall under it, including commercial video-uploaders. And the Dutch Advertising Code, applied by the Advertising Code Committee, sets self-regulatory standards for all advertising, with a specific code for social media and influencer marketing.

Self-regulation has no formal sanction, but it is not toothless. Recommendations are published, media and platforms take them into account, and a finding that a campaign breached the Code is evidence in a later civil claim. For a brand, the reputational effect of a published recommendation usually outweighs any fine that was never going to be imposed.

The recurring failures are simple. Sponsored content is not marked, or is marked in a way the audience cannot see. Claims about sustainability, health or price are made without substantiation, which reverses the evidential position rather than avoiding it. Personal data is used for targeting without a lawful basis, which brings the data protection authority into a matter that started as an advertising question.

What to check before you publish

Most media claims are avoidable, and the checks that prevent them are short. Establish whether the material is yours or licensed, and keep the licence rather than the memory of it. Where a person is identifiable, ask what interest they have in not being depicted and whether the publication serves a genuine public interest that outweighs it. Where an allegation of fact is made, ask what evidence supported it at the moment of publication, not what emerged afterwards, and give the person concerned a real opportunity to respond. Where the content is commercial, ask whether the audience can tell that it is.

If a claim does arrive, the first hours matter. A summary judgment application for a takedown can be heard within days, so a demand letter with a short deadline is often followed immediately by proceedings. Preserve the file, including the version published and the sources relied on, before anything is amended, and take advice before removing material, because an unnecessary removal can be read as an admission and rarely ends the claim.

Media law in the Netherlands rewards preparation and punishes improvisation. Law & More advises publishers, broadcasters, businesses and content creators on publication risk, takedown and rectification claims, copyright and portrait rights, advertising compliance and the obligations that the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act place on platforms and media providers. We also act for individuals confronted with a publication about them. For a broader overview of the digital rules, see our Dutch IT law guides, or contact Law & More to discuss a specific publication or claim.