Open Letter From TorrentFreak To Brein
Written by Ernesto on November 25, 2007The infamous anti-piracy watchdog BREIN infringed our copyright earlier this week as they used a quote from one of our articles without attribution. As a follow up to our previous article, we wrote an open letter to BREIN to educate the public about their lack of respect for the rights of people who don’t pay them millions.
Here’s what the MPAA has to say about what Brein did: “Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person’s shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging.”
One of our counsels has put together an open letter to BREIN to show how hypocritical they are. They don’t care about copyright, they care about money and blame pirates for the inability of their clients to adapt their business models to technological change.
Letter:
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Dear Mr Kuik
Being vociferous exponents of the fight against copyright infringement, your organization is expected to uphold the highest possible standards where the misuse of other people’s intellectual property is concerned.
It has been brought to my attention that your organization has reproduced text from an article published by this website concerning the website SumoTorrent, without prior written consent1 and without complying with the copyright terms applicable to this publication, TorrentFreak2.
Specifically, your organization has selectively and misleadingly quoted from our publication without properly attributing the source, in contravention of the Creative Commons license3 under which this text was published. This is a contemptible infringement of our own intellectual property rights, illustrative of a gross lack of professionalism on your part.
Furthermore, you have mischievously and inaccurately attributed the source of the material stolen from ourselves as being “a pirate weblog”. This amounts to actionable libel, inasmuch that neither the owners nor the staff of this publication – a well respected and widely read source of filesharing news - have ever been accused, suspected or prosecuted, for any so-called act of piracy. We are neither sailors nor thieves of other people’s intellectual property, unlike yourselves.
Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world. Much of the material that is shared by sites targeted by yourselves such as SumoTorrent is open source, copyright has never been asserted or it is in the public domain. To presume otherwise is to add arrogance to the ignorance your organization has already exhibited.
There is, and there can never be, any legitimacy attached to your harassment5 of those who merely assist in finding the location of such copyright free material. The indiscriminate prevention of people’s enjoyment of their own property, in this case their own computers, is in direct contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights4.
Having learned that you have falsely claimed that a District Court judgment in June 2007 against a specific defendant amounted to some sort of precedent, justifying your demand that others breach data protection principles5 & 6, my expectations of your professionalism are not high.
Whilst I harbor no illusions that you will have the grace to apologize for your unwarranted breach of my own rights in these matters, this letter will serve to educate others and make public your abuse of process, your contempt for the rights of others and your outright hypocrisy.
Sincerely
TorrentFreak Counsel
legal@torrentfreak.com
—
References:
1: http://www.anti-piracy.nl/nieuws/bericht.asp?nieuwsberichtid=98
2: http://torrentfreak.com/brein-pirates-torrentfreak-071119/
3: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights
Article 1: Obligation to respect Human Rights
Article 7: No punishment without law
Protocol 1: Rights to enjoyment of property
5: Letter from LeaseWeb describing illegal pressure from BREIN
6: EC Directive 95/46
End
We never seriously considered taking any legal action, we were simply mirroring the behavior of these anti-piracy organizations. The main difference is that we aren’t malicious and we pride ourselves on never threatening people.
Previously: The Pirate Bay Cancels OiNK Replacement
Next: QuebecTorrent Lawsuit: Backdoor to Banning All Canadian BitTorrent Sites?
132 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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Cool stuff!
They will never answer this letter :D
They are too stupid to understand it’s contents.
“illustrative of a gross lack of professionalism on your part”
Isn’t any malice hidden in your actions? Any desire to morally confuse or bother others? Furthermore, calling them “thieves” isn’t representative of their general actions, and in my mind isn’t more ethically advanced than piratebay’s legal section.
By the way I liked the first paragraph of the letter.
Peace out.
Well written! :)
Good job haha!
From what I understand, organisations like BREIN and MPAA and others like them have a very limited knowledge of technology and a very big amount of ignorance.
I apllaud your efforts to make these b….rds blunders known to public, and I really hope all these people one day wake up and get beaten up haha!
Good job :)
Hope they try and respond, lawl, -insert foot in mouth-
pwned
Come on sue their ass!
Attention whore. You are just as stupid as BREIN when you lower to their methods of whining.
Nicely typed! I applaud all of you fine chaps here on TorrentFreak. What a great demonstration of intellectual strength from the TorrentFreak Counsel! Now if we could somehow make ‘BREIN’ understand at least half the letter they may finally clean the wax out of their ears and listen to reason if that’s even possible. Cheers! Back to me yummy jellybabies!
MPAA and other “anti piracy gang” just care about money, fucking bitch (gay) in the ass and take drugs! You can’t educate all these retarded!
I agree with Reb (#10). sure you’ve got a decent vocabulary, but this letter is just stepping down to the level of BREIN. You claim to be fighting against unjust claims of copyright infringement, but here you are, doing exactly what BREIN and the MPAA have been doing. Yes, BREIN are hypocrits… but so are you! You should all grow up, n00bs!
Very nice letter!
Unfortunately, I doubt that, like the TorrentFreak, they post letters that they receive for their visitors’ viewing. They’ll probably hide the letter under the rug and hope no one finds it…
Nice letter. I think after the first paragraph the evil folks at BREIN might have had internal damage done to their primitive brains. I could see it now ambulances heading to the company rushing BREIN employees to a hopital’s brain surgery rooms. Some doctors will be working a bit of overtime soon. Start a new fundraiser BREIN. Having brain surgery empties your bank accounts in a blink of an eye.
pirated what? the lone english sentence in the second paragraph? such short works don’t fall under copyright law.
Great letter. The info is good enough to get an ‘A’ in a Harvard class, but I would strongly advise using a different tactic against any Anti-piracy groups. They sting us, we bite them back with deadly venom.
“You should all grow up, n00bs?”
N00bs…seriously? Ok I think we know who really needs to grow up.
Good job TorrentFreak. I knew there would be no legal action involved because that would jjust be a waste of time. Yet, it was a great idea to make this public and to write this letter. Their hipocrisy was bound to be discovered sooner or later.
impressive. i rather snorted when i first read the headline. i was wrong.
Good idea about writing a letter, but it should have stayed as an idea. Not actually going through with it. Next time seek a second opinion (your loyal readers)about your next move. I’m sure your readers can come up with something more fierce and fun to counter BREIN’s pathetic actions. It’s good to see TorrentFreak has some people with intelligence.
[quote comment="223510"]Attention whore. You are just as stupid as BREIN when you lower to their methods of whining.[/quote]
Sue sue sue sue!
THIS SIGHT ALSO POSTED LINKS AND POSTED STOLEN EMAIL MESSAGES-Hence all are breaking laws, behave and calm down kiddies.
I like the letter! Kudos to you TorrentFreak. But come on you need to do more than just a letter. Your just imitating them. I admit that was very low for BREIN to do a copy and paste action but, let’s hit them a little harder than just this letter. Hacking skills anyone?
Could someone translate this letter in Dutch, it could be possible that (the ignorant) mr Kuik or one of his associates will not be able too fully understand this letter.
Yes we Dutch like to show up about our language skills but mostly it sucks . My experience is that many are be able to read and understand it still missing the main point.
Don’t take a risk emphasize it in Dutch…
Quite professional on TorrentFreaks’ behalf. Be more assertive with a touch of aggresion next time. Brein doesn’t deserve to be treated with classy respect.
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