Dutch clog up The Pirate Bay (again)

This time, we mean it

By Team Register, 11th January 2012

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A Dutch court has ordered two popular ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, or face fines of €10,000 a day. The case was brought by Dutch anti-piracy coalition BREIN.

The case dates back to a 2009 court decision to block access to the Swedish-founded site.

Court-ordered blocks are becoming almost routine. On Monday a Finnish district court ordered that ISP Elisa must block access to The Pirate Bay, a judgment which Elisa is appealing. Hollywood studios also succeeded in legal moves requiring BT to block access to Usenet scraper Newzbin2.

Copyright owners argue that the costs and difficulties of enforcing their rights are unfair: Newzbin cost hundreds of thousands in legal fees and 18 months, by which time the site had moved on. The blocks are also less than watertight, but copyright holders say that matters less.

The UK government has said it won't implement measures to block access to websites that are now on the statute book. Talks to draw up voluntary replacement agreements, between creative industries and ISPs, rumble on in the background.

Coincidentally, the BREIN site is currently offline. Perhaps they've gone to a smoke-free bar to celebrate. ®

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Posted Wednesday 11th January 2012 18:48 GMT

Anomalous Cowturd

Or perhaps they're listening to tunes in a smoking bar...

Vis: http://www.geek.com/articles/news/dutch-anti-piracy-group-brein-caught-stealing-music-2011122/

Posted Wednesday 11th January 2012 20:37 GMT

ShelLuser

Waste of the taxpayers money

After suffering an (IMO) devastating failure BREIN is now simply revealing their true nature; an organization (funded by the government) which tries to enforce censorship and obviously has no problems with violating Dutch laws.

The failure part should be obvious; the head honcho himself has traveled several times up and down to Sweden to "investigate" Piratebay. Personally I came to conclude that the longer this "fued" continued the more did it began to look like a personal crusade. Piratebay was portrait as a "source of evil" and they were going to get them. That was over 3 years ago. Needless to say but the whole scheme failed; despite many "brave" (sic) attempts Piratebay kept going strong. One can only wonder how much tax money has been wasted on all this.

So here we are now. Instead of taking responsibility for their own failures BREIN simply continues to hunt windmills. Since they can't succeed in stopping the "offenders" they now resort to enforcing two Dutch ISP's to block their customers from these "offenders". The whole thing is a joke really; the Judge has basically ordered that XS4All and Ziggo (ISP's) should 3 IP addresses and 24 domains. BREIN also has the right to supply newly discovered addresses which should then also be blocked.

This is a rather odd decision by the court because under Dutch law we are allowed to freely download material from the Internet. It becomes an issue when people are providing (illegal) material.

Alas; needless to say that this is all a moot issue considering how the Piratebay basically provides .torrent files which are also kept by a dozen other websites. Or to put this differently; while many people will be sorry to see them "go" (there are also zillions of ways to overcome all this) in the end they won't really be missed.

So concluding; another epic failure. This accomplishes nothing apart from wasting a lot of the taxpayers money. And in the end absolutely nothing will change when it comes to the availability of "illegal" material.

Posted Wednesday 11th January 2012 20:57 GMT

Annihilator