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:
—
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
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I think you should have tried to take legal action and sue for moral damages.
[quote comment="223612"][quote comment="223599"]if anyone stole my stereo i’d stab that fucker in the throat, male or female that fucker would get a parker pen trach job from me[/quote]
I would kick them in the nutz so hard their nutz would be cracked leaking semen and filling up their scrotem sack. No roshambo here. If its a female, I’d be like stop stealing my stereo and get your b_tch azz in the kitchen and make me some pie. Then I’d stab her in the carroted vein in her neck. Steal my stereo you better get ready to bake.[/quote]
LOL WUT
[quote comment="224318"]I’m surprised nobody has said the word “plagarism” here by now, because that’s what it boils down to… and I’d think in the EU, there’d be far more legal precedent to nail them on plagarism, than on piracy.
All the same, this is a good way to wake Brein up to just how insane they truly are.[/quote]
Plagarism is different. That is taking someone elses work and claiming as your own, or giving no references to the authors.
Copying and sharing or distribution cannot be called plagarism - unless the copier also says “I made this”.
bmqd qksg xlzsciqda atsblfdux bfvi rizpdyj nbaxisep
Man don’t back up I’m serious I know some lawyers in Holland if you have solid evidence you should pull it off!
We have here a liberal court system you could bring up the demonoid incident as example and if the court doesn’t justify your claim then they
expelled demonoid without any legal base. Thats pretty much ignoring the Dutch constitution.
To bittrucker (#20):
From what I understand, this letter IS still just an idea, because it was never actually given to anyone, simply posted here for kicks and giggles amongst those who care.
To Others:
I don’t know about copyright law (or rather I know About it, but simply don’t care for the purposes of this comment), but the large part of the argument against BREIN in this case is not about a breach of copyright so much as a breach of professionalism (as noted in the letter above). Amongst normal citizenry, the people expect that law enforcement will, at times, have to enforce the law against other normal citizens, whether for legitimate reasons or for simply being a part of the law-enforcement process. It sucks, but for the most part we accept it. What we don’t accept is when that enforcement is carried out unprofessionally: When we hear about a bunch of police officers beating a man to within inches of consciousness, we become upset not because they are arresting him, but because they are treating him inhumanely and not giving him the rights that we expect him to be given, and which those officers are expected to honor. When an organization such as BREIN (that name is already annoying me, by-the-way) carries through with legitimate arrests, others from outside their circles may grumble a bit but accept the steps, however when that same organization begins to use quote-unquote ‘underhanded tactics’, such as twisting the facts, hiding those things that may harm their cause whilst twisting other things to the optimum to help their cause (often to the point of presenting a statement that works at a paramount to its original context), and perhaps most grievously, hiding these breaches of professionalism to further their image of purity, those who see these things have a right to be upset because they are all methods of circumventing Law by using Propaganda (which, by the way, was the biggest weapon that the Nazi party used to win over the hearts of the German people, followed soon by the toppling of German Law). This, alone, however is of little consequence, after all the film industry has been using such tactics since its inception (horror stories of bad movies using the line “Two Thumbs Down!” and twisting them to read “Two Thumbs [..]!” come to mind), these things CAN be dealt with. The problem in this case is that this organization has used that propagandic, and a further lack of professionalism, to now hide the facts of their own breaches of the very laws that they seek so greatly to protect and enforce, once such things such as Copyright Infringement (no matter how small) and internal file sharing (which also infringes upon copyrights, by the very admission of the ones involved from what I read), it becomes no different from groups of Police Officers who bear the law with clubs and shotguns in the faces of unarmed men. The law-bearers become law-breakers, and soon the broken laws become changed to match the new laws that protect the law-breakers, and in all it would make the Nazi’s proud (after all, that’s how THEY had come to such power as they’d had, while blaming it on their opposition, as these BREIN people seem to be doing).
With all this in mind, I can understand how a lot of people could be a tad miffed at even an inherently small breach of protocol, because history shows us that small things lead to big things, especially when perpetrated by those immune to repercussions from their crimes. So while I think that sueing them would likely be a waste of time, making them aware of the fact that they are acting unprofessionally and therefore treading upon dangerous ground seems, to me, to be fair.
Also to be fair: Without copyright laws, I doubt that Gutenburgh would have made the printing press, which he otherwise would never have gotten anything back from his invention. On the other hand, if all laws were enforced with heavy-handed measures, no one would be making anything for the fear of being attacked by batteries of sword-bearing legionites; balance and sanity is needed, and MUST be proactively protected, lest… well, you know. It doesn’t take much to cause the Balance of Justice to tip, and once tipped it takes extra effort to regain balance.
Disclaimer: The names of BREIN, Nazi, Police-Officers, Law Enforcement, bittrucker, Others, and any other names, ideas, concepts, or references to individual identities that may or not be contractually owned by any party, whether involved in the discussion or not, are not owned by me and are used here without explicit permission. If asked by any party in contractual ownership of them, I would rescind my use of them to the full extent possible within my abilities (limited as they are), and seek permission for their use in the future.
License for further use: Other than the above Disclaimer’s limitations, I give all people, organizations, and even automated services full permission to use everything presented in this post, in full or in part, with or without citation, so long as the purpose of the above Disclaimer remains in effect.
(A tad over-the-top, but with the current discussion being what it is, why take chances?)
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