Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm is partner of bureau Brandeis. He specialises in digital copyright, the liability of intermediaries, privacy and free speech issues. He is both a trusted advisor to his clients such as KPN, Netflix and eBay and an experienced litigator. “He is brilliant and able do the most difficult cases, because he understands the technology as well as the law. He is not easy to outsmart,” one of his legal peers is quoted in Chambers.

Members of Parliament, both Dutch and European, call upon him regularly for advice on technology law matters. He is a frequent speaker and often appears on national television and in other media as a commentator on current legal events.

Besides his work as an attorney, he is a senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm is also the author of a work of fiction. His debut novel ‘The Trial of the Century’ (“Het proces van de eeuw”) came out in 2011 and is currently running its seventh edition.

Recent work:

• Representing XS4ALL in a case about DNS- and IP-blocking before the European Court of Justice. Still pending.
• Representing Sanoma / Playboy in a landmark case about (copyright) liability of hyperlinking to protected content. Victory.
• Representing the Netherlands Publishers Associations in a landmark case about the legality of making available second-hand e-books. Victory.
• Representing eBay subsidiary Marktplaats before the Court of Appeals of Leeuwarden in a case concerning the liability of classified ads websites. Victory. Marktplaats was not under an obligation to pro-actively block or filter infringing ads;
• Representing NORMA, a collecting rights society for actors, in a case against the Dutch State over unlawful legislation. Victory. The Court of Appeals of The Hague determined that the State had acted unlawful by freezing a system of copyright levies to compensate private uses;
• Advising ISPs and other intermediaries about the disclosure of personal data of its subscribers to copyright holders and law enforcement authorities;
• Assisting the Dutch Royal Library in obtaining collective licenses for scanning and making available its archive of news papers, magazines and books.

Companies he works for:

KPN, XS4ALL, Netflix, Airbnb and eBay.