On May 10th, the Court of The Hague ordered an additional five ISPs – UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort – to block two TPB IP addresses and 20 domain names within 10 days or face fines of up to 250,000 euros.

These pair of court rulings, although similar, were not identical. In the first ruling permission was given for BREIN to add additional IP addresses should The Pirate Bay choose to switch or add IP addresses to their site.

Not surprisingly and as already reported, TPB did in fact add a new IP address plus a proxy-friendly version of their site in recent days. BREIN was quick to react and has now ordered Ziggo and XS4ALL to block the IP address 194.71.107.80 within 10 days or face fines of up to 250,000 euros.

However, in the second ruling against the five other ISPs, the Court felt that the XS4ALL/Ziggo ruling went too far. As a result the Court only allowed two TPB specific IPs to be censored and disallowed BREIN from simply adding more. This means that even when the ban kicks in during the days to come, users of UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort will be able to access TPB by using the IP address listed above.

Although not required by law to block the recently-added IP address, Webwereld reports that two ISPs have confirmed they were approached by BREIN to do so.

“We will do not comply without a court order”, said Jan-Willem te Gussinklo Ohmann, spokesman for Tele2.

“We will not respond to [BREIN's] request,” said a spokesperson for KPN. “Our position is: we’re not going to make destinations on the Internet inaccessible to our subscribers without a judge determining that it is necessary.”

However, contesting the addition of new IP addresses isn’t the only way these ISPs are resisting web blockades. From the first ruling, Ziggo and XS4ALL already announced that they will appeal and now from the second ruling, Tele2 have just confirmed that they have done the same.

“At the moment BREIN wants a blockade of The Pirate Bay, but tomorrow there may be other interest groups preparing their wishlists,” Tele2 said. “The ruling is a threat to Internet freedom in our country.”

Source: ISPs Refuse to Block New Pirate Bay IP-Address

In an attempt to take these proxies offline the Hollywood funded anti-piracy group BREIN obtained an injunction against one of the sites and used this to convince others to shut down as well.

The list of secondary targets included the local Pirate Party, who initially refused to give in to the demands but were later ordered to take their reverse proxy offline by the court. The Pirate Party claimed that the case against them amounted to a restriction of their freedom of speech, and sued BREIN over the order.

Today the Court of The Hague delivered its verdict, which confirms most of the earlier injunction. The Pirate Party is now forbidden from encouraging the public to circumvent the Pirate Bay blockade and from listing or hosting tools that can enable others to do so.

The Court specifically ruled that the Party’s reverse proxy has to remain offline. It was further ordered that Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses have to be filtered from the Pirate Party’s generic proxy. In addition the Pirate Party can’t link to other websites that allow the public to bypass the blockade. These orders are only valid when paired with an encouragement to circumvent.

Should the Pirate Party fail to comply with the Court’s ruling it faces fines of €5,000 per day to a maximum penalty of €250,000.

“For many who where hoping for the law to come to the rescue of basic civil liberties, today must be a rough awakening,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak in a comment. “This ridiculously broad verdict allows BREIN to take down any site that is posting information that displeases their censors.”

“A first in Dutch law is that a judge has now also ordered a generic proxy to filter internet traffic as well. BREIN has created jurisprudence that will now allow them to come after any open proxy they have set their sights on.”

Pirate Bay proxies are a hot topic, and not just in the Netherlands. Last week the UK High Court also ordered local ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay website. As a result the proxy site of the UK Pirate Party became overloaded with visitors.

Whether BREIN’s equivalent in the UK will act against this and other proxies is unknown.

The ruling against the Dutch Pirate Party is the second today regarding The Pirate Bay. This morning the Court of The Hague ordered five more Dutch Internet providers to censor the torrent site. This means that pretty much all Dutch Internet users are now affected by the blockade.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, continues to share alternative means for blocked users to access the site. At the same time, the press attention is resulting in millions of extra visitors for the notorious BitTorrent site.

Source: Court Forbids Linking to Pirate Bay Proxies

The lawsuit is the next move in BREIN’s attempt to deny Dutch citizens’ access to The Pirate Bay.

In January, a Dutch court ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the country, and competitor XS4ALL, must block access to The Pirate Bay. As a result hundreds of individuals setup proxy websites allowing subscribers to route around the blockade, effectively rendering the order useless.

In a countering move BREIN obtained an injunction from the court to shut these proxies down, including one operated by the Pirate Party. However, the Pirates are determined to put up a fight and have taken BREIN to court to get the order overthrown.

The case, in which the Pirate Party asked the court to lift all censorship restrictions, was heard by the court yesterday. BREIN, however, did exactly the opposite by submitting a rather broad set of new demands essentially asking the court to gag the political party.

In short BREIN’s demands are as follows.

1. The Pirate Party should be banned from operating a reverse proxy for Pirate Bay

2. The Pirate Party should be banned from operating a generic proxy service

3. The Pirate Party should be banned from linking to third-party proxies

4. The Pirate Party should be banned from listing new IP-addresses / domains Pirate Bay registers

5. The Pirate Party should be banned from encouraging people to circumvent the Pirate Bay blockade

If the Pirate Party violates the above terms BREIN asked for a penalty of €10,000 per day, up to a maximum of €250,000.

Needless to say, the demands of the anti-piracy group are unprecedented for a copyright related case. It is essentially a gag-order to enforce a previously obtained court verdict. If the court sides with BREIN this will have rather far-reaching consequences for people’s freedom of speech. It may also invite other parties to consider making similar demands.

The question is also how far BREIN wants to take this. Should other generic proxy sites be banned as well? And what about VPNs or the TOR network? All of these services allow the public to bypass the court-ordered blockade.

Meanwhile, the popular Dutch weblog Geenstijl is making some noise as well, as they launched a redirection site (FuckTimKuik.org) that forwards people to available proxies. BREIN has yet to respond to this initiative, but it shows that it will be quite difficult to root out all circumvention methods.

The court’s decision in the case between the Pirate Party and BREIN is expected to be published in two weeks. This verdict will coincide with BREIN’s case against two other Dutch Internet providers that are still allowing access to The Pirate Bay.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Asks Court to Gag The Pirate Party

Two weeks ago BREIN ordered the Party to take down a reverse Pirate Bay proxy. The site allowed subscribers of two Dutch Internet providers to bypass a court ordered blockade of the notorious torrent site, and BREIN argued that the proxy was sabotaging this order.

Initially the Pirate Party refused to give in to the demands, but when they were confronted with an injunction from the court right before the weekend they had no other choice than to comply. The Pirates took down the reverse proxy and replaced it with a protest page linking to dozens of other ways people can access The Pirate Bay.

On Saturday, BREIN sent a follow-up letter urging the Party to take down these links as well, including the Party’s generic proxy. However, aside from removing the hyperlinks, the Pirates rejected these demands. Instead, they have now announced that they will sue the anti-piracy group.

“By dragging BREIN to court, the Pirate Party finally has the chance to put forward arguments to strike the court injunction that was unilaterally imposed on it last friday by Dutch entertainment industry organization BREIN,” the Party announced today.

Through the courts the Pirate Party hopes to get the ex parte injunction overturned. The Party argues that they have the right to be heard, and say that the court allowed BREIN to take justice into their own hands by adding extra demands under threat of draconian penalties.

“It is time that the industry attack dogs understand that you can’t trample on people’s freedoms for your own monetary gain,” Pirate Party board member blauwbaard says.

“Today we’ll try to explain to the judge how giving BREIN one blocking instrument causes them to stretch it in unjust ways to stifle free speech and the free flow of information. Paraphrasing Victor Hugo, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” he adds.

The Pirate Bay case is keeping BREIN busy this month as the group is also taking two new Dutch Internet providers to court to expand the local blockade.

The Pirate Party is glad that finally they will be able to strike back at their nemesis. Freedom of speech and an Open Internet are two core issues of the Party which they are eager to defend.

“The Dutch Pirate Party calls upon all pirates and freedom-loving landlubbers to stand up and support our fight against censorship. Because as Martin Luther King might have said it, were he alive today, ‘freedom on the Internet is indivisible, a threat to freedom of the Internet anywhere is a threat to freedom on the Internet everywhere’,” they state.

Update: Adding fuel to the fire, the prominent Dutch weblog Geenstijl created a proxy redirector at FuckTimKuik.org. Ouch.

Update 2: The Pirate Party scored a first victory in court.

Source: Pirate Party Sues Hollywood Backed Group over Pirate Bay Censorship

These proxies render the court order useless, which is a thorn in the side of local anti-piracy outfit BREIN. In an attempt to take these proxies offline, BREIN obtained an injunction against one of the sites and used this to convince others to shut down as well.

While several site operators gave BREIN what they wanted, the local Pirate Party refused to do so. They claimed that BREIN’s demands are hampering people’s freedom of speech, and objected to the fact that an “ex parte” decision against one proxy was used to “threaten” other site owners.

“The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak last week.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy,” he added.

So the Pirate Party kept the proxy site offline and consulted with lawyers to see what steps could be taken next. However, BREIN wasn’t sitting still either and asked the Court of The Hague for a new injunction, specifically naming the Pirate Party proxy.

This injunction was issued yesterday, and the court orders the Pirates to take the proxy offline within 6 hours, or face a penalty of 10,000 euro per day. BREIN successfully argued that the proxy is an immediate threat to the effectiveness of the ISP blockade, and submitted tweets of Pirate Party chairman who confirmed how much traffic the site received.

The Pirate Party was not heard in the matter (ex parte) and according to board member “blauwbaard” the judge ignored their requests to be heard.

“The judge has decided to ignore our express and valid request to have the injunction either denied flat-out, or to at least be heard in the matter before a decision was made,” blauwbaard states in a response.

“This decision is even more strange because BREIN was allowed to bring over 20 pages of arguments to convince the judge to stretch a quaint rule of IP-law, meant to block the sudden appearance of mass quantities of counterfeited goods, far enough to be applied to the website of a political party.”

Faced with huge fines, the Dutch Pirate Party saw no other option than to take the proxy offline, replacing it with a list of tip and alternative proxies. Monday the Pirate Party will file a request to overturn the injunction, meaning that while BREIN won the first battle, the war is far from over.

Source: Pirate Party Ordered to Shut Down Pirate Bay Proxy

Both ISPs appealed the verdict, but in the meantime affected subscribers have plenty of ways to route around the blockades. In the space of a few days hundreds of individuals setup proxy websites that allow customers of the ISPs to continue using The Pirate Bay.

Countering this move, local anti-piracy outfit BREIN obtained an injunction from the Court of The Hague which instructed the proxy site tpb.dehomies.nl to shut down or face a 1000 euros a day fine. The group is now using this injunction to press other site owners to do the same.

Last week the local Pirate Party also received a letter from BREIN, demanding the shutdown of their Pirate Bay proxy site hosted at tpb.piratenpartij.nl. However, unlike the site owners that were previously contacted by the group, the Pirate Party is not caving in. They would rather fight the case in court.

Today the Party informed BREIN that the proxy site will stay online. To show that The Pirate Bay can be a useful communication tool the Pirate Party sent the letter through a torrent file, hosted on the BitTorrent site at the center of the dispute.

“The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.”

According to the Pirate Party chairman BREIN’s efforts are not just going too far, they are useless too.

“There are a plethora of proxy sites on the internet. On almost any them TPB can by reached, even with a single URL. That’s not even mentioning the ways you can get to TPB if you’re willing to put in more effort than saving a single URL. If this keeps going there will be no Internet left by the time BREIN has achieved its goal of making TPB inaccessible.”

“In their self-righteous zealousness they have brought substantial damage to the free and open Internet,” Poot said.

While the legality of The Pirate Bay and reverse proxy sites is for the courts to decide, it is clear that blocking the website hurts legitimate artists as well.

In BREIN’s demand letter the anti-piracy group pasted a screenshot of the proxy site showing the Pirate Bay homepage. But ironically enough, instead of the iconic logo it showed one of the many promotional campaigns the torrent site is running for independent artists.

The Pirate Party believes that the broad censorship BREIN is pushing for goes too far. And although they are not delighted to face thousands of euros in fines, they see it as their duty to fight back in court.

“Unless someone calls them on their tactics, they will be allowed to continue those tactics indefinitely. Yielding does not make the problem go away. We would preferred to tackle this issue in parliament, where it belongs. However, if we have a chance to stop this ex-parte from being reused again and again, we ought to grab it. We’ll need serious donations, though…,” Poot told us.

More news about the upcoming lawsuit is expected to be announced in the coming weeks. BREIN was asked to comment on the issue as well, but the group kindly declined.

Source: Pirate Party Refuses to Shutdown Pirate Bay Proxy, Faces Lawsuit

The ruling was the first to bring broad censorship to the Netherlands, but as always the Internet finds ways to route around such blockades. In the space of a few days hundreds of individuals setup proxy websites that allow customers of the ISPs to continue using The Pirate Bay.

These proxies render the court order useless, which is a thorn in the side of local anti-piracy outfit BREIN. In an attempt to take these proxies offline, BREIN has contacted the owners of these proxy sites, ordering to take down the proxies – or else.

This week the anti-piracy group obtained an injunction from the Court of The Hague which instructs the proxy site tpb.dehomies.nl to shut down. If the site owner continues to offer access to The Pirate Bay he risks a fine of 1000 euros per day.

Armed with the court papers, BREIN also contacted the operators of many other proxy sites including alwaysapirate.org and remastered.nl who quickly took their sites offline and replaced them with a message from the anti-piracy group.

Depiratebay.nl and thepiratebay2.nl were also contacted by BREIN, but these sites remain accessible for now.

The 15-year old operator of the latter site confirmed that he will take the site offline before BREIN’s deadline passes this Friday. While he doesn’t agree with BREIN’s request, he simply doesn’t have the resources to put up a fight in court.

In their letter to the site owners, BREIN threatens legal action against those who continue to keep their proxies online. In many cases, this threat of being sued by a conglomerate of US movie studios is enough to convince proxy owners to fold.

“These sites deliberately offer a service to circumvent a court injunction. If they do not comply, we will hold them liable for damages,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a comment to Tweakers.

It will be interesting to see for how long BREIN can continue this cat and mouse game. The proxies targeted so far were all specifically aimed at Dutch visitors and hosted on Dutch servers. Whether it will be as effective against sites hosted elsewhere remains to be seen.

The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they are not worried about the fate of their Dutch visitors. They expect that for every proxy that goes offline, new ones will spring up, as is usually the case. There are plenty of free proxy tools available and everyone with a WordPress blog can set one up in a few clicks.

If anything, The Pirate Bay crew believes that BREIN is giving them a helping hand.

“Thanks yet again for the free advertising,” they say.

The Pirate Bay has a point here. All the talk about censorship and blockades only appears to strengthen the notorious torrent site. When there was talk about a UK blockade two weeks ago, local traffic surged. And visitors from Belgium and the Netherlands have massively turned to proxy sites after the torrent site was censored there.

To quote John Gilmore once again: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Shuts Down Pirate Bay Proxies

The ruling was the first to bring broad censorship to the Netherlands and in a response XS4ALL said they were “bitterly disappointed”, noting that fundamental rights had been traded for “commercial interests.”

For BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group that started the court case, the verdict wasn’t quite enough. The Hollywood-backed group wasted no time issuing requests for other ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay as well. Or else.

After internal discussions two large ISPs – KPN and T-Mobile – are now on record stating they will not honor BREIN’s request. This means that millions of Internet users in the Netherlands will still be able to access The Pirate Bay without having to go through proxies.

Speaking out against censorship, both Internet providers state they will only block The Pirate Bay following a court order and that innovation is a better way to deal with the problem of piracy.

“KPN sees the blocking of websites as a drastic measure for which a court order is required,” KPN said in a statement, adding that innovation is needed to curb piracy.

“KPN doesn’t believe a blockade is the right solution. What is needed are robust, attractive business models that are easy to use and offer a fair deal to both producers and consumers of content.”

T-Mobile also said that it will only respond to court orders, while it emphasized the value of an open Internet.

“T-Mobile strongly supports an open Internet and is fundamentally against shutting off access to websites. Dutch law is very clear when it comes to blocking access to the Internet. T-Mobile will only respond to a court ruling, not to demands from a private party such as BREIN.”

If BREIN follows up on threats that were made earlier, both ISPs can expect to be sued by the anti-piracy outfit in the near future. Ziggo and XS4ALL, meanwhile, are expected to enforce the blockade this coming Wednesday, February 1st.

Whether the blockade will have much of an effect is yet to be seen. Judging from what happened in other countries when the site was blocked, users will quickly find ways to route around the blockade to regain access to the world’s largest torrent site.

Source: Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay

To help avoid a damaging legal precedent, Ziggo was joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL. Initially the partnership was successful. The Court of The Hague decided that blocking all customer access to The Pirate Bay was a step too far. BREIN, refusing to give in, launched a full trial.

During November last year that case was heard before the Court of The Hague. BREIN argued that it would be trivial for the ISPs to initiate a block of The Pirate Bay, while the ISPs stated that doing so could compromise the security of their networks, threaten freedom of expression, and would ultimately prove ineffective.

BREIN countered by insisting they have rights too – copyrights – and that the reason the ISPs don’t want to block TPB is because they profit by selling bandwidth to users so they can access it.

Today, the Court of the Hague delivered its verdict – and it’s victory for BREIN.

The Court noted that approximately 30% of Ziggo subscribers and 4.5% of XS4ALL subscribers use The Pirate Bay to share unauthorized media. Downloading copyright material is currently legal in the Netherlands but uploading is not, so due to the two-way nature of BitTorrent it is deemed that those customers are infringing copyright.

While the Court noted that an ISP blockade against The Pirate Bay would also prevent subscribers with legitimate business from accessing the site, it said that the legal offerings available there are not only limited, but also available from other sites. Preventing a large number of copyright infringements trumps the availability of a more limited supply of legal content, the Court noted.

Furthermore, the Court concluded that in granting an injunction to block The Pirate Bay it would only be preventing access to a site already subject to a court order which forced its operators to block access to Internet users in the Netherlands. That order was previously issued by the Amsterdam Court but was ignored by the site’s operators.

Spokesperson for XS4ALL, Niels Huijbregts, said the company is “bitterly disappointed” by the decision, noting that fundamental rights had been traded for “commercial interests”.

The ISPs have ten days in which to initiate the blockade – failure to do so will result in fines of 10,000 euros per day.

Update: BREIN says it will ask other Dutch ISPs to block The Pirate Bay as well.

Update: XS4ALL says it will appeal the verdict.

Update: Ziggo will also appeal.

Source: Dutch ISPs Ordered To Block The Pirate Bay

It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.

However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.

The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).

The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.

Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.

Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.

In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.

The conversation between Gerrits and the composer’s financial advisor was recorded by Pownews, and during the conversation the financial advisor confronts Gerrits with his unconventional proposal.

“Why do you have to earn money?” he asks, as usually all of the money goes directly to the artists.

“It could be because a lot of people in the industry know that they are in trouble when I get involved,” Gerrits responds, adding that he can bring up the topic immediately in a board meeting next week.

Once again trying to find confirmation for the proposal, the composer’s advisor later asks if the music boss indeed wants one-third of the money.

“Yes, that’s the case, but then [the composer] would make 660,000 euros and now he has nothing,” Gerrits responds calmly.

The seemingly corrupt practices of Gerrits resulted in mass disbelief among many Dutch viewers and today the news is being reported by several mainstream outlets in the Netherlands. As a result of the controversy, Gerrits quickly decided to temporarily resign as Buma/Stemra board member to focus on his defense.

Responding to the press, Gerrits further claims that he was somehow “misinterpreted,” but unfortunately for him the recordings leave little room for that.

BREIN director Tim Kuik, whose organization is accused of distributing the unauthorized copies, noted to TorrentFreak that this is a contractual issue in which BREIN is not involved. Kuik further said that BREIN is not the distributer nor the client in this case.

Whatever BREIN’s role in this case, there is little doubt that someone in the movie industry failed to pay the composer. And instead of standing up for the rights of a musician, a board member of the music royalty collection agency tried to exploit the situation for financial gain.

Sickening.

Update: Pownews’ written report no longer references BREIN’s involvement in the case. Although BREIN is responsible for many anti-piracy warnings on DVDs in The Netherlands, the video described in this article was made for another party related to the movie industry. This confirms the statement of BREIN director Tim Kuik.

Update: Dutch politicians, musicians and a Buma/Stemra board member are shocked by the revelations and describe Gerrits’ actions as “corrupt,” a “money grab” and “mafia-like.” Politicians want more transparency from the royalty collecting agency, and will debate the issue in parliament.

Source: Copyright Corruption Scandal Surrounds Anti-Piracy Campaign

Today the case was heard before Court of The Hague

BREIN wants the largest ISP in The Netherlands to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay, with any future domain names and IP addresses of the site blocked within 24 hours of notification by BREIN.

The anti-piracy group argues that the ISPs can easily block the site with simple technical measures, and that as a result millions of people would be prevented from sharing files via the notorious torrent site.

The ISPs on the other hand claim that these measures are not as simple as BREIN claims, and that their implementation could have disastrous results.

Rebooting network services after adding DNS and IP-filters “could shut down the entire network,” the defense noted.

In addition the defense argued that such measures would be useless because the public can easily circumvent them by using alternative DNS servers and proxy sites. BREIN didn’t refute this, but noted that the blocks are “dummy proof” and that the majority of people wouldn’t jump through hoops to access The Pirate Bay.

Aside from the technical objections the ISPs also said that this type of censorship would violate basic human rights such as freedom of expression. Xs4all lawyer Milica Antic said it would turn the providers into the “Internet police” and that copyright holders should turn to the people who host the site itself.

BREIN countered these arguments and said that freedom of expression is “not that relevant,” and pointed out the copyright holders also have the right to protect their property. The fact that The Pirate Bay also hosts links pointing to legal content doesn’t take away these rights, BREIN’s lawyer said.

BREIN went even further and claimed that the ISPs don’t want to block The Pirate Bay because they “profit” from it. Millions of people in The Netherlands use BitTorrent, and blocking the Pirate Bay would drive people to other providers.

The case between the ISPs and BREIN brings up many of the censorship issues that are also being discussed in the United States at the moment. The pending SOPA legislation would make DNS and IP-blocks standard procedure, something BREIN can only dream of at this point.

The verdict in the case is expected to be announced early next year.

Source: ISPs: Blocking The Pirate Bay Violates Freedom of Expression

Although the name NSE might not ring a bell with many people, it is the largest usenet provider in Europe and has many high-profile resellers such as Usenext.

Through the court BREIN demanded that the NSE delete all infringing content from its servers, and six weeks ago the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In an attempt to keep their service operational, NSE asked the Court to put the execution of the verdict on hold while the Usenet provider appealed its case, but this week that request was denied. As a result NSE was forced to shut down its services.

“This means that we are forced to cease our operations with immediate effect,” NSE said in a statement.

Despite the setback the Usenet provider will persist with its appeal, not least because the landmark verdict could have disastrous consequences for other Usenet providers.

“For reasons of principle, News-Service.com will not accept the verdict and has lodged an appeal,” NSE announced.

The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.

Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.

BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak contacted NSE to ask what the decision means for their resellers and whether they have plans to “go abroad” in some shape or form. We will update this article when a response comes in.

Source: Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order

The group demanded that the Usenet provider delete all infringing content from its servers, and today the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In an unprecedented verdict the court ruled that NSE has to remove all copyrighted content within four weeks, or pay 50,000 euros ($68,000) in fines per day. The court states that NSE willingly facilitates copyright infringement through its services.

NSE argued that are simply transmitting content, much like an Internet provider does. However, the court rejected this defense, adding that a notice and takedown procedure is insufficient to protect the rightsholders.

The decision could have far-reaching consequences for many other Internet services, starting with NSE resellers such as Binverse and Usenext..

“We are very disappointed with the Court’s verdict. It is technically as well as economically unfeasible to check the contents of the 15 to 20 million messages that are exchanged on a daily basis. Added to which, there is no automated way of checking whether Usenet messages contain copyrighted material or whether permission has been obtained for the distribution of such material,” NSE CEO Patrick Schreurs said in a comment.

“We see no way of complying with this verdict. Furthermore, the verdict endangers our very existence as a company, and is thus a threat to Usenet itself, as the facilitation of Usenet services has become impossible on the grounds of this verdict. The exchange of messages by means of this oldest of Internet services has de facto become impossible,” he adds.

The Usenet provider is currently considering whether it should appeal the decision.

BREIN is delighted with the verdict of the court, which is very similar to the one that signaled the end of the BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago.

“It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik responded.

There is little doubt that the verdict of the Amsterdam Court is going to have a huge impact on the Usenet market, and the question has to be asked where it will stop. Could file-hosting services like MegaUpload and RapidShare be next? And what about other cloud hosting services such as Dropbox?

For now, however, NSE is faced with the impossible task of finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers.

Source: Major Usenet Provider Ordered to Remove All Infringing Content

Earlier this month BREIN announced that it would query payment providers such as PayPal for the personal information of account holders connected to ‘illegal’ sites. BREIN threatened to take these payment providers to court if they refused to cooperate, and it now appears that they were serious.

BREIN contacted a currently unnamed payment provider for the name and address of a torrent site owner who accepted donations. Initially the company declined to cooperate, but when BREIN scheduled a court case to obtain a preliminary injunction, the payment provider eventually caved in.

In the past BREIN succeeded in obtaining the personal details of torrent site owners from hosting providers, but since these are not always accurate his outfit is always looking for additional options. Going after payment providers seems to be their next logical step.

“The name and address information that illegal sites give to hosting providers are mostly false, but luckily financial service providers are required to verify the identity of their customers,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a comment. “This gives us the ability to still find out the identity of managers of sites that earn money from their illegal activities.”

Although there are various concerns about this process from a privacy point of view, it appears that BREIN’s request could fall within the boundaries of the law. Arnoud Engelfriet, lawyer with the Ictrecht law firm, explains that service providers may have little option than to cooperate.

“Dutch case law (in particular the Pessers/Lycos case) has held that in certain cases internet providers and other intermediaries are indeed required to hand over identifying information if a customer is likely committing a tort. A court intervention is not necessary according to our High Court,” he previously told TorrentFreak.

“The legal requirements are that it is without serious doubt that this customer is committing the tort, that releasing the identifying information is relevant for the case *and* that an evaluation of customer privacy versus the interests of the third party reveals ultimately that privacy must give way to those interests.”

In this particular case the payment provider was convinced that the actions of the torrent site were severe enough to give up the private information. One has to question though if the ‘evidence’ presented by a party that has a clear stake in a dispute will be objective.

TorrentFreak asked BREIN director Tim Kuik whether he could provide more information regarding the nature of the torrent site they went after, but Kuik declined to release any additional information at this point.

What BREIN plans to do with the information they received from the payment provider is not clear either. The anti-piracy outfit has obtained this type of information from hosting companies in the past, but we’re not aware of any legal action that was taken against these torrent site owners.

For now, however, BREIN is free to contact payment providers with further requests, which they have already indicated is their intention.

Source: Payment Provider Hands Over Name of Torrent Site Owner

For many the payment processor – PayPal and other similar services – provide their financial lifeline. After years of ignoring this Achilles’ heel, anti-piracy companies are taking steps to exploit this weakness and this week another group announced their plans – and they’re controversial to say the least.

“We are in talks with the Dutch payment providers and are working towards partnerships,” says Tim Kuik, chief of anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Kuik says that by offering payment solutions to file-sharing sites, services such as PayPal are doing business with unlawful entities and therefore contributing to their ‘crimes’.

The idea isn’t new. In the United States the forthcoming PROTECT IP Act will oblige payment processors to stop doing business with “rogue sites” and in the UK the IFPI have similar but more private deals in the pipeline.

With BREIN, the ball is already rolling. The Hollywood-funded group has written to an unnamed selection of payment processors seeking cooperation with the issue in hand – strangling the finances of sites that BREIN, not a court, deem to be illegal.

But BREIN also sees the payment processors as potentially useful in another highly controversial area.

“We are often faced with services that operate anonymously and have given their hosting provider false information,” Kuik said. “We suspect that the payment providers have a good track, because the money they send has to go somewhere.”

Of course, BREIN have a job to do and will do whatever they can to achieve their goals, but when Kuik elaborated further in a discussion with Future of Copyright this week, it became clear that controversy is not something the group shies away from.

“We have requested several payment providers to give BREIN the name and address of illegal file sharing sites,” Kuik explained.

Now, BREIN hasn’t been to court on order to obtain specific permission to obtain this data, yet Kuik says that the payment processors can simply hand over the private details of account owners to his company. Unsurprisingly, the targets of BREIN’s affections aren’t yet falling over themselves to comply.

“The payment providers do not seem very willing to cooperate yet, but are deliberating on a response,” says Kuik. But he says they better respond positively – the pleasantries won’t last forever.

“If there will be no response, BREIN will sue them and refer the matter to court,” he warns.

Arnoud Engelfriet, a lawyer with Ictrecht law firm, believes that the law could be on BREIN’s side.

“Dutch case law (in particular the Pessers/Lycos case) has held that in certain cases internet providers and other intermediaries are indeed required to hand over identifying information if a customer is likely committing a tort. A court intervention is not necessary according to our High Court,” he told TorrentFreak.

“The legal requirements are that it is without serious doubt that this customer is committing the tort, that releasing the identifying information is relevant for the case *and* that an evaluation of customer privacy versus the interests of the third party reveals ultimately that privacy must give way to those interests.

“For example, if I am a whistleblower, my privacy would be very important and my employer wouldn’t easily get my identifying information with this ruling,” Engelfriet adds.

“For banks and payment processors the same requirement would apply. They have to evaluate how likely it is that their customer is violating third party rights and that handing over this data is more important than protecting the privacy of their customers.”

But Engelfriet says that given the sensitivity that banks normally apply to customer details, he would be surprised if they handed over this information without a fight.

“Freely handing over details would set a big precedent for them: anyone with a complaint could demand customer information. E.g. you buy something on eBay and you feel duped, you would demand bank information. Besides, banks have big pockets so I’m not too worried,” Engelfriet concludes.

Kuik won’t say which payment processors he’s contacted thus far, but says that should BREIN sue them their identities will quickly become public.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Will Sue Pay Processors If They Don’t Name Site Admins

The group was responsible for the demise of the once largest torrent site Mininova, achieved a conviction against the Pirate Bay founders, and more recently expanded its track record with a victory against one of the largest Usenet communities on the Internet.

All the above was accomplished even though the actual downloading of copyrighted movies and music for personal use is completely legal in BREIN’s home country. In the Netherlands only the uploading part of file-sharing is punishable by law, but if new plans from the Government are adopted this may soon change.

Today, State Secretary of Security and Justice Fred Teeven announced that the Government wants to modernize current copyright law. One of the most drastic changes put forward in the new plans is that in addition to uploading, downloading of all copyrighted material will also be outlawed.

In addition to a complete ban on the sharing of copyrighted material, the new copyright plans will also get rid of the “copy-levy” on blank CDs and DVDs. This levy, ranging from $0.20 to $0.87 per piece, was put in place to compensate rights holders for the films and music that were copied for personal use.

The State Secretary notes that the changes related to file-sharing will not mean that the Government will actively prosecute individual downloaders, but stresses that they are needed to get “pirate websites” blocked by Internet service providers. At the moment this is impossible. Last year BREIN sued two of the largest Dutch ISPs, requesting that they should block their customers’ access to The Pirate Bay, but the attempt failed.

State Secretary Teeven emphasizes that The Pirate Bay is one of the main targets, although he misspells the website url in his official letter, pointing to piratebay.org instead. According to the State Secretary, The Pirate Bay is “a major resource of illegal material” which should be blocked by ISPs.

Although applicable to all citizens, the new law is specifically aimed at the blocking of illegal websites. There will be no three-strikes rules as proposed in other countries, and the Government will not chase individual file-sharers.

In a response to the news, BREIN confirmed that it will not go after individual file-sharers in the future either. Their prime targets are the websites that facilitate copyright infringement, not their users.

Aside from toughening the law, the new plans also include ‘protections’ for the privacy of file-sharers. One of the key points is that the rights holders can only claim the personal details of an alleged infringer if that person shared copyrighted material on a massive scale. This would prevent the pay-up-or-else settlement schemes that are currently ongoing in the United States.

Source: Dutch Government To Outlaw File-Sharing and Block The Pirate Bay

Since late Monday evening BREIN’s website has been offline due to a major DDoS attack. Word is that some people aren’t happy with the recent activities of the Hollywood-backed group and have taken the distribution of justice into their own hands.

While that might be a logical assumption there is currently no evidence to prove that is the case. That said, retaliation and revenge is often the motive for DDoS attacks. But if we’re looking for likely culprits on that basis, the potential list of instigators – considering the number of sites BREIN has taken down – would be huge.

Nevertheless, accusatory fingers are already being pointed by BREIN. According to Tim Kuik the DDoS is a revenge attack following his company’s involvement in the takedown of the FTD Usenet community recently.

“Supporters of FTD are probably behind the attack,” Kuik said. “We think that because the timing of the closing of FTD and the beginning of the attack exactly coincide,” he added. BREIN has been logging the IP addresses of the attackers and they apparently originate from The Netherlands.

However, Arnoud Engelfriet, the lawyer who defended FTD in their case against BREIN, said that FTD were not in favor of the assault.

“FTD deplores the DDoS attack as this isn’t the way to fight BREIN,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak. “Executing DDoS attacks only strengthens the image that filesharing or downloading is a criminal activity, which does not help the cause.”

While it’s possible that the demise of their community prompted a minority of FTD fans to take the law into their own hands, they’re not the only ones crossing BREIN from their Christmas card list.

In January, BREIN managed to aggravate a whole bunch of warez Scene members when they seized the servers of the Swan topsite. Hate levels increased again in February when BREIN took down around a dozen Usenet sites. Add this to hundreds of smaller sites taken down last year and it starts getting to the point where it’s easier to make a list of supporters than enemies.

This is not the first time that BREIN has suffered an attack on its web presence and then publicly linked it to a site it had previously targeted. In 2009, the founders of The Pirate Bay threatened to sue BREIN in Sweden after Tim Kuik accused them of carrying out a DDoS attack against his company’s site.

Source: Anti-Piracy Outfit Suffers Huge DDoS Attack, Blames Usenet Users

This week, with the support of Solv Advocaten, one of The Netherlands’ top law firms, server owner Alejandra Transporte SA, a small South American hosting provider that had nothing to do with the topsite, managed to get their servers back. Unlike BREIN, Alejandra Transporte did so through the legal system, obtaining authorization from the Court of Haarlem.

Now in an interview with Webwereld, Alejandra Transporte boss Craig Salmond has been explaining how the actions of BREIN have “ruined his business” by “stealing” $138,000 worth of his equipment.

“BREIN – with the active participation of WorldStream – effectively killed my business,” said Salmond. “My equipment was stolen and the keys to my reputation.”

Salmond said that Alejandra Transporte is a small ISP that takes the privacy of its users very seriously and says the facilities offered are similar similar to those provided by renowned bullet-proof hoster PRQ in Sweden. The manner in which Alejandra Transporte can accept payments from customers to maintain their privacy is also innovative.

“Customers can transfer money through Western Union but also, for example through a deposit at different poker sites,” Salmond explains. “So we reach people who do not have access to services such as PayPal or for privacy reasons do not want to use it.”

But of course, in January Alejandra Transporte went offline thanks to BREIN and WorldStream. Salmond says that when he called WorldStream, they refused to tell him anything, instead referring him back to BREIN.

“[WorldStream] are actually responsible for this,” Salmond told Webwereld. “WorldStream has a contract with me, I entrusted them to take care of and manage my property. They have grossly violated my trust and given my servers away.”

Disputing BREIN’s claims that they seized 12 of his servers (they took only 8), Salmond says that to know exactly how much capacity they had, BREIN must have gained illegal access to the machines. Furthermore, in correspondence with Salmond, BREIN themselves indicated that they somehow had acquired what is described as “a temporary account” on the servers before they were seized, leading to accusations that BREIN could have easily uploaded any material they liked, thus contaminating the investigation.

And the accusations don’t stop there.

Salmond says that following the seizures he could no longer access some GMail accounts since their passwords had been changed. He attributes this to BREIN having hijacked the accounts.

“What BREIN and WorldStream have done, can not be tolerated,” said Milica Antic of Solv lawfirm who are representing Salmond. “My client sees this as theft of his property. He has also suffered enormous financial and reputational damage.”

This case again appears to highlight the perils of copyright-supporting outfits such as BREIN – who have no official authority – carrying out investigations in a manner more fitting of governmental bodies such as the police or the courts.

Just this week the case against two administrators of the FileSoup BitTorrent site was thrown out. FACT – another Hollywood-backed private anti-piracy group with confusions as to the extent of their powers – had conducted their own investigations into the site but the evidence proved worthless to a criminal case and was dismissed.

Source: Hosting Company: Anti-Pirates Stole $138,000 In Kit & Hijacked Our Email

Hitting at the top of the so-called piracy pyramid, BREIN had taken down the Swan warez Scene topsite. Formerly known as ATS, Swan operated from several servers and reportedly carried more than 200 terabytes of data.

Although the site naturally had connections to a variety of Scene groups, the action taken by BREIN wasn’t aided by the police or a court so none of the individuals involved are facing legal action.

However, this lack of an official legal process rang a couple of loud alarm bells given developments in the case. BREIN boss Tim Kuik admitted that his organization had somehow acquired the Swan servers from hosting provider WorldStream, who in turn weren’t in a position to simply give other people’s equipment to a third party.

Nevertheless, both BREIN and WorldStream defended their positions, positions which have now come back to bite them.

It later transpired that the servers were owned by Alejandra Transporte SA, a small South American hosting provider that had nothing to do with the topsite and as an ISP had no knowledge of what its equipment was being used for.

Acting on behalf of Alejandra Transporte, lawyers Solv Advocaten in The Netherlands have been taking legal action to force BREIN to hand back their client’s equipment, and yesterday those measures bore fruit. Following authorization from the Court of Haarlem, bayliffs seized the servers back from BREIN.

“BREIN took the property of my client (8 high end servers) without any court order or warrant. Also, BREIN states to have gained access to the servers. On these servers [business and private material] is stored,” Milica Antic of Solv Advocaten told TorrentFreak.

“Since my client is a hosting provider, also content of third parties (the customers of my client) is on these servers. This is a breach of privacy, to say the least.”

WorldStream, the server host and a private company, handed BREIN the servers voluntarily. As noted by Milica Antic to us in conversation this morning, BREIN is also a private organization and has no special legal or investigative authority. Nevertheless, the pair reached an agreement and BREIN took the servers away whilst refusing to reveal their location.

At the time of the seizure, BREIN boss Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak that his organization “exerts the rights and civil enforcement remedies of copyright holders” which “includes seizure of servers used for infringements.”

Solv Advocaten see things very differently and are stating that by seizing the property of another without having permission from a judge, BREIN is guilty of vigilantism.

Earlier, Tim Kuik said that if the owner of the servers wanted them back they could step forward but pointed out that this may have its drawbacks – BREIN could seek to hold them liable for the activities that took place on the servers.

However, Solv Advocaten insist that as a hosting provider Alejandra Transporte does not know what content it hosts for its clients and is therefore not liable. Indeed, in this case BREIN themselves could become the hunted.

“If we commence further proceedings against BREIN it will be on basis of breach of property rights and breach of privacy,” Milica Antic concluded.

Update: “Two members of Dutch Parliament have asked the Minister of Justice questions about this matter,” Milica Antic has just informed TorrentFreak. “They are particularly concerned about the fact that BREIN has gained access to the servers on which the business and private administration of my client is stored.”

Source: BREIN Seizes Warez Servers, Owners Seize Them Back, May Sue

BREIN is now reporting that it has just forced the closure of 11 Usenet-related sites with a combined membership in excess of 900,000. As usual the Netherlands based outfit has refrained from formally naming its targets on its website in order to starve them of publicity should they choose to bounce back with new hosts. However, at least eight sites – nzbkingdom.net, Twilightnzb.com, Furiousnzb.net, Shreknzb.com, Team-Casanova.com, Crosspost.nl, Cobra-team.nl and FTAClub.net – are displaying messages which indicate interference from BREIN.

According to Webwereld, Dutch Binaries Program remains up but has ceased reporting the location of unauthorized content on Usenet. Other sites listed as affected include Movie2b and D4D.

The closures come hot on the heels of BREIN’s victory against the 500,000 member FTD Usenet portal earlier this month. Although FTD didn’t host or even link to any copyrighted material, after a prolonged legal battle a court ruled that the site was illegal because just 13 FTD members from more than half a million not only reported the location of infringing files on the worldwide Usenet system, but also uploaded them there. FTD will shut down March 1st.

However, despite the overall defeat for FTD, the court proceedings showed that the site didn’t breach copyrights, that the overwhelming percentage of its users acted legally and that the ‘spotting’ (reporting the location) of copyright material is also within the law.

So, the big question is this. When BREIN waved the FTD verdict at these sites and/or their hosts in order to force closure or compliance, had they previously gathered evidence to prove that members of these sites had been uploading content to Usenet?

TorrentFreak posed this very question to BREIN boss Tim Kuik this morning but we have yet to receive a response. However, for lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, who has intimate knowledge of the law in this area through his connections with FTD, things aren’t so cut and dried.

“BREIN is using the FTD verdict to threaten other sites into closing. Even though the verdict clearly said downloading is legal and ‘facilitating’ downloading is legal as well, BREIN is now saying that sites that provide NZB files are facilitating illegal downloading,” he explained.

“This is a gross misrepresentation of what the verdict was actually about. Unfortunately it’s typical for BREIN to present their own view rather than the facts in order to force sites offline.”

The verdict in the FTD case clarified some points of law in The Netherlands, including the legality of downloading material even if from an illegal source. The court also concluded that facilitating downloading, even when this is done from an illegal source, cannot be unlawful.

Nevertheless, when an intimidating Hollywood proxy comes knocking on your door, shutting down is clearly an option being favored by many.

Source: BREIN Uses Court Win As Leverage To Wipe Out Usenet Sites

Two years ago, FTD turned the tables on Dutch anti-piracy BREIN by taking the outfit to court. FTD asked the court to declare that it operates within the boundaries of Dutch law, and further requested BREIN to retract an earlier statement that the Usenet portal operated illegally. Today the court announced its verdict, a negative one for the popular Usenet portal.

Although FTD doesn’t host or even link to any copyrighted material, the Haarlem Court ruled that the portal does provide a promotional venue for uploaders of infringing material, as they can post a description of the locations (so called spots) where these files can be downloaded.

In the verdict the court further confirmed that FTD itself isn’t breaking any copyrights, that FTD users aren’t necessarily breaking any laws either and that spotting itself is not illegal. However, the fact that uploaders of unauthorized content can ‘spot’ files is enough to deem the whole system to be illegal.

“FTD ‘contributed’ to the uploading of materials to Usenet by giving [uploaders] a platform to announce their evil deed. While only 13 of the 500,000 FTD users were identified as uploaders, the court said that that was enough. FTD is facilitating and stimulating the illegal uploading (posting) of material to Usenet and therefore committing a tort,” FTD’s legal counsel Arnoud Engelfriet informed TorrentFreak.

FTD was ordered to remove so-called spots of copyrighted files within a month. In the event that FTD fails to comply with this order they will have to pay BREIN 15,000 euros per day up to a maximum of 300,000 euros ($410,000).

BREIN welcomed the decision of the Haarlem Court, which also states that the anti-piracy outfit doesn’t have to retract an earlier statement in the Dutch press where it labeled FTD as a criminal organization.

“The principle that you are not allowed to structurally make use of illegal files with your website or service applies not only to Internet but also to Usenet,” said BREIN director Tim Kuik in a comment. “BREIN will also hold liable any other websites and services that do the same regardless of the technical protocol they use for their illegal business model.”

Today’s verdict follows an earlier court decision against the Usenet portal. November last year FTD was found guilty of promoting the illegal uploading of a Dutch movie in a separate case. Whether FTD will appeal, and what the verdict means for the continuation of FTD (and possibly all file-sharing portals) will become clear in the near future.

Source: Usenet Portal Loses Landmark Court Case Against BREIN

Last November it reported some of the largest torrent sites to the US Government, including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and BTjunkie, calling them piracy havens.

In a follow up to the many accusations, the MPAA has now managed to shutter 12 torrent sites at once, a headline designed to send shockwaves through the BitTorrent community.

The MPAA has teamed up with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, who have perfected the art of pulling sites offline. In the last two years alone the organization has (temporarily) disabled more than 1000 torrent sites in The Netherlands, and they are now helping the MPAA towards doing the same in the US.

Twelve torrent sites were wiped from the Internet this week, but there is a catch to this ‘unprecedented’ action. As often with BREIN-led takedowns, nobody noticed a thing. If a torrent site of any significance goes offline for an hour or two our email inbox is usually alive with reports from readers. Today, however, we received none.

That doesn’t mean of course that the news isn’t worth reporting on. BREIN issued a press-release earlier today in which they appear very satisfied with what they’ve accomplished, and they assure the public that this isn’t the last time we will hear about such a torrent site massacre.

At the same time BREIN head Tim Kuik also explained why they target small players and why they keep the site names a secret.

“New sites are popping up, but we take these down faster and faster so they can’t gain an audience,” Kuik says. “Our goal is to limit the availability of illegal sites so people rather use legal platforms. BREIN doesn’t publish any names because some sites relocate and start over elsewhere.”

The MPAA, perhaps wisely, didn’t release a comment at all.

That leaves us with a final question for our readers. Do you happen to know of a torrent site that has gone missing over the past several days, or do you have more information on the affected sites? Feel free to get in touch with us.

Source: MPAA Takes A Dozen Torrent Sites Offline

The site had connections to a variety of scene groups and allegedly sold access to several well-known private BitTorrent trackers. Although the unplugging will be seen as an inconvenience and might delay some releases, none of the persons connected to the site appear to be facing legal action.

BREIN generally informs hosting providers of its suspicion that ‘illegal activity’ is taking place on their infrastructure and without the authorities getting involved the hosting provider then decides whether or not to take action. According to this scenario it is not impossible that Swan could reappear in a different location, as we’ve seen happening dozens of times after BREIN pulled torrent sites offline. But Scene groups and networks are complex creatures and take more time to reconstruct.

However, BREIN’s head Tim Kuik stated in a comment that his outfit is now in possession of the Swan servers. This is interesting to say the least, because BREIN has no authority to seize any equipment on its own, and the hosting provider can’t just hand over private customer data without a warrant.

In a comment Swan’s hosting provider Worldstream avoided these peculiarities and simply stated that they were happy to cooperate with BREIN.

“We can not accept such activities in our network,” the WorldStream owners explained. “BREIN is known as a reliable partner and provided very clear evidence to demonstrate that unauthorized files were made available on the servers. For us it was therefore quickly decided to cooperate in this action.”

The owner of Swan, who operates under the nickname MrTB, has also responded with a response to the events. With the exclamation “F*** me i’m famous!” MrTB claims that the ‘bust’ is the result of the actions of a rogue member. In addition he claims that BREIN misrepresented the facts since Swan only operated 8 servers holding 175 terabytes of data.

“I’m waiting for BREIN to offer me a job. I’ll be a one man wrecking crew: TaH, TDA, KoP, AUS, TEL, DC, FUK, TITS, PANDORA, NOT, GUK, 100SE plus the other 30 sites I was on,” he added.

“Peace out, and fuck you all!”

The last statement seems to indicate that Swan is not planning to make a return any time soon. This makes the BREIN action, albeit trivial, very effective. BREIN’s head Tim Kuik was asked for a comment regarding the ‘seizure’ of the servers but has yet to respond.

Update: Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak the following in response to the seizure of the servers.

“BREIN exerts the rights and civil enforcement remedies of copyright holders. That includes seizure of servers used for infringements. These can be claimed as property of the right holders. If the owner wants them back, he needs to identify himself, which of course means that he can be held liable as well, if we don’t locate him first. We have ample evidence of the unlawful activities carried out with the servers in question. This evidence convinced the hosting provider to cooperate. Conducting unlawful activities also is in contravention of hosting providers’ terms of use.”

Source: Anti-Piracy Outfit Unplugs Warez Topsite ‘Swan’

In the criminal case the operator of ShareConnector, aDi, came out as the winner in 2007 and was released from all charges. However, the Department of Justice decided to appeal the case two years later and charged aDi and six other admins with membership of a criminal organization and assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material.

However, instead of getting a conviction this time around the case turned into a total embarrassment for the Department of Justice. Last summer the court decided to reopen the case and summoned the public prosecutor as it doubted the legitimacy of the criminal prosecution which relied on evidence brought in by local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Yesterday the lengthy court battle came to an end with the Court of The Hague dismissing the case (Dutch).

The Court concluded that the authorities failed to provide any evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in mass copyright infringement, nor enough to prove that it was criminal in nature. In addition, the judge ruled that the initial arrests were unlawful as the evidence provided by BREIN was insufficient.

The Court ruled that the public prosecutor should have conducted an independent investigation instead of relying blindly on the ‘evidence’ provided by BREIN. Since this didn’t happen, the evidence used in the case was seen as illegitimate.

“It’s incredible that it took the court six years and numerous trials to conclude that the allegations from BREIN should not be taken seriously. It was a setup from the very beginning since the deaf from BREIN didn’t want to play clean and instead used the blind dogs from the Department of Justice,” aDi told TorrentFreak in a response. “This is a victory,” he added, “for now and for the future.”

In a response to the dismissed case BREIN’s head Tim Kuik came out with a statement emphasizing that ShareConnector itself was found to be an unlawful service.

BREIN won their civil case against the site in March this year. In that case the court ruled that the operator of ShareConnector wasn’t guilty of copyright infringement, but that the site must remain closed for good since it facilitated copyright infringement.

The ShareConnector case touches on a recurring topic in file-sharing related investigations – the close cooperation between private anti-piracy groups and judicial authorities. When an arrest is made or a raid is carried out, the police are often assisted by members of the local anti-piracy lobby group.

It sometimes appears as if BREIN, MPAA, RIAA, BPI and others are part of the authorities, but in fact they have their own agenda and absolutely no reason to be neutral investigators. It’s good to see that the Court of The Hague spotted this illegitimate process in the ShareConnector case. The Department of Justice is not a puppet of anti-piracy outfits.

Source: Court Dismisses ShareConnector Case Citing Faulty Evidence

The names of the sites, which appear to have been offering links to movies, music, TV shows, games and books, are currently unavailable but at least one appears to be identified as HD-UNiT3D.

As can be seen from its http://hd-united.com/ URL, it diverts straight to BREIN’s homepage.

Despite being hosted in the US the anti-piracy outfit cited Dutch law as the reason for the closures. “They are directed at the Dutch public” and “unlawful under Dutch law,” Kuik told TorrentFreak.

“This year we have made over 600 of these sites inaccessible. Some seek refuge in a foreign hosting provider. These 29 apparently thought that in America they could go undisturbed. That is incorrect,” Kuik said.

“Through cooperation with our foreign colleagues we can make sites in other countries inaccessible,” he added.

BREIN says it will also seek out the personal details of those who operate the sites in order to hold them personally liable.

As mentioned in our earlier articles, BREIN has indeed closed down many torrent and Usenet related sites. However, while some of them have been reasonably sized, most of them are particularly small and easy to close by pressuring their hosts.

The fact that none of the owners or users of the sites have alerted us about these alleged closures suggests that no sizable sites were included.

The MPAA are yet to make a statement on the action and as yet BREIN haven’t formally identified any of the sites targeted. If past actions are anything to go by, they will try to avoid naming them for fear of giving them even more publicity.

That HD-UNiT3D is redirecting to BREIN’s homepage is both worrying and suspicious. Previously, BREIN simply asked the hosting providers to take the sites down or face the legal consequences. This is the first time that they appear to have gained some level of control over a domain, an action that is usually only taken by the authorities and not a private anti-piracy group. Whether this is the result of old-fashioned pressure or something else will remain to be seen.

Update: TorrentFreak requested a list of the affected domains from BREIN and received this response from Tim Kuik.

“No that would amount to free PR for the sites that intend to continue their unlawful activities at another hosting provider. These are not large sites and we want to keep it that way.”

In response to a question about how the sites were taken offline:

“The sites were taken down by the hosting provider,” said Kuik.

Source: MPAA Shuts Down 29 BitTorrent and NZB Sites

Mininova was left with little choice, having been forced into these drastic measures by a negative verdict in their court battle with local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

The Dutch court told Mininova that it had to remove all infringing torrent files from its index, while threatening the site with huge fines for non-compliance. That selective task, however, proved technically unfeasible. Instead, the site’s owners took the decision to remove all torrents uploaded by regular users, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Following this decision Mininova started to lose visitors at a rapid pace. A year after the court decision the site lost most of its traffic, as former users looked for alternative torrent sites with a wider variety of content.

Meanwhile, the legal battle between Mininova and BREIN continued in the background. Mininova appealed the verdict at the Court of Amsterdam and BREIN prepared a damages claim on behalf of the entertainment industry.

In addition, both parties began negotiating a mutual agreement that would be acceptable to all parties involved, and they succeeded in finalizing that today.

“Both parties have now reached a settlement. Mininova will abide the verdict of the Court of Utrecht and will withdraw the appeal. In order to settle the matter permanently, Mininova pays Brein an undisclosed amount of money,” the Mininova team announced.

Instead of fighting the decision with all means available to them, Mininova decided that it was for the best to pay a settlement fee instead. The agreement announced today puts an end to the ongoing legal battle between Mininova and BREIN.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he’s happy with the outcome, and relieved that the legal proceedings are finally over. For more than two years Mininova has negotiated with BREIN, both in private and in the court room, and the current outcome was seemingly inevitable.

“Even though Mininova filed pro forma appeal, we strongly felt that giving up on it was a sacrifice BREIN made. After all Dutch case law makes clear appeal of verdict would’ve been decided in favor of rightholders,” BREIN’s head Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak.

“We both agreed settlement was preferable over a long drawn court battle over damages. We carry no grudge and wish the guys from Mininova the very best with their new ventures, including the Mininova site in its present form that it took since 29 November 2009,” Kuik added.

Mininova will continue to operate as a torrent site with authorized uploaders only, as it has been for the past year.

Source: Mininova Pays Settlement to BREIN to End BitTorrent Lawsuit

According to BREIN, FTD is a service which allows users to illegally download movies, TV shows and music. Interestingly, the anti-piracy outfit also claimed in court proceedings that FTD facilitates uploading.

This somewhat unusual accusation is made on the basis that ‘spots’ – reports made by FTD users which indicate where material may be found on Usenet – are made by people who also upload the material to Usenet and not innocent third parties that just happen to see material there.

In their defense, FTD argues that they are a community for spotters, who under Dutch law may download legally and hence should be entitled to point out the location of material on Usenet.

FTD insists that their users do not upload material to Usenet, but this assumption is now being tested since FTD didn’t count on ‘piracy’ being carried out by some special users in its community who were actually working for those they now face in court – BREIN.

It appears that the Dutch anti-piracy group had as many as 15 undercover investigators operating inside FTD, working as any regular members might by ‘spotting’ media. BREIN’s Tim Kuik admits that these people were on the site but insists they were there to observe how the service operates.

However, according to FTD lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, things went a significant step further.

“Some interesting items have come to light. Most notably, the anti-piracy outfit actually posted a movie on Usenet in order to ‘spot’ it on FTD so as to claim this kind of thing happens on FTD,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak.

The claims center around one particular ‘spy’ who went by the username of ‘NieZoekeNie’. FTD logged this user’s IP address and following checks it was traced back to an IP owned by BREIN. FTD say that the ‘NieZoekeNie’ account was operated by Mr Van Habraken, a BREIN employee.

According to site records, NieZoekeNie ‘spotted’ a movie on Usenet – Laurel and Hardy’s ‘Big’ – and reported it on FTD. However, as can be seen from the screenshot below and an actual Usenet search, a user with the very same name also uploaded the movie to Usenet.

Staff also discovered that the same IP address used by NieZoekeNie was in use on three other user accounts on FTD – hackstatic, BamBamIam and Gab2009.

The first two of this trio – hackstatic and BamBamIam – were confirmed in court as anti-piracy operatives when BREIN provided screenshots of FTD ‘in action’ but neglected to blank out the names of user accounts they used to gather the evidence.

While it could be considered a coincidence that a username associated with a Usenet movie upload could be ‘spotted’ by a different individual that just happened to be utilizing the same name, it raises an interesting issue. BREIN earlier matched some FTD usernames with those used by some Usenet uploaders and has presented that information as ‘proof’ that they are the same people.

That particular evidential knife seems to cut both ways, but BREIN boss Tim Kuik is having none of it.

“No this is nonsense. FTD appears to be trying to draw attention away from its own dubious and illegal activity with irrelevant and spurious allegations,” he told TorrentFreak earlier this evening.

“We have not nor will ever illegally upload any content. This is totally irrelevant for the case just like the previous story about putting an NZB button or torrent search function on the BREIN site. The issue at hand and before the court is the dubious and illegal activity of FTD. These allegations actually serve as a further example of FTD’s deliberate obfuscation.”

A decision in the case is expected during November.

Source: Lawyer: BREIN Anti-Piracy Spy Uploaded Pirated Movie To Usenet

On the opposing side of the war on piracy we have groups like The Pirate Party. The political outfit has its roots in Sweden but is active in more than 30 countries worldwide, including BREIN’s home The Netherlands where it participated in the general elections earlier this year without success.

The Dutch Pirate Party is headed by Samir Allioui who formerly led Pirate Party International, an umbrella organization for all Pirate parties worldwide. As is his job, Allioui carefully watches the local media for piracy related discussions and he’s not too shy to respond to writings he doesn’t approve of.

So, when the Dutch newspaper De Pers published a column detailing why sharing copyrighted movies and music is wrong, he was quick to respond with a rebuttal piece. On Twitter, he alerted BREIN’s head Tim Kuik to his article, since Kuik had plugged the original piece a few hours earlier.

This tweet was the start of an interesting conversation between the two, starting with the following response from Tim Kuik.

TimKuik: @SamirAllioui ehh, let me think…it’s hard…added a nice drawing…bullshit?…yeah that’s it .. bullshit!”

SamirAllioui: @TimKuik Good to know you don’t have any arguments against it content wise :)

TimKuik: @SamirAllioui ouch, you are so sharp, no wonder you’ve won so many seats, but now I am going back to serious issues

SamirAllioui: @TimKuik The Greens were not taken seriously either. But what they’ve done in 30 years, the Pirates did in 4 years. Time will tell.

TimKuik: @SamirAllioui But Samir … I believe you even applied for a job with us

This last tweet of Kuik doesn’t make much sense. TorrentFreak asked Allioui if he has any clue what BREIN’s boss is referring to, but he drew a blank as well. Our best guess is that Kuik is jokingly referring to Allioui’s byline, where he says he’s doing freelance work as a ‘information security’ expert. We also asked Tim for clarification and are awaiting a response.

After the last tweet the conversation moved on to other accusations. Allioui indirectly accuses BREIN of rent seeking and abusing the legal system in favor of the entertainment industry. Kuik obviously sees things differently and says they only ask the courts to uphold the law.

After some tweets back and forth and a good night sleep (to sober up?) the discussion ended this morning.

TimKuik: @SamirAllioui well, I’ve had enough fun with the Claptrap Party, I’m going back to real work

Claptrap in Dutch is ‘prietpraat’ which is phonetically close to ‘piet piraat’, a Dutch/Belgian kids show about a pirate.

It’s needless to say that both sides don’t have much respect for the opinion of the other, but it’s remarkable that they fought this out in public on Twitter. There seems to be quite a bit of unvented frustration that needed to be released. However, they can throw as much mud as they want but it is unthinkable that they’ll come even an inch closer to agreeing.

Source: Pirate Party Leader and Anti-Piracy Boss Clash in Twitter Fight

According to BREIN, FTD is a service which allows users to easily but illegally download movies, TV shows and music. FTD see themselves differently and state that they only allow their members to point out where such content might be found on Usenet.

A statement sent to TorrentFreak by FTD lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet of Ictrecht law firm noted that the four hour long hearing took place in the largest court room available but generated enough interest to still become crowded.

Lawyer Gijsbert Brunt began by outlining how FTD operates. He argued that FTD allows users to report or ‘spot’ where material may be found on Usenet, but does nothing more than this, adding that FTD does not upload any content to users, nor does it offer users any downloads.

Brunt further argued that FTD’s service is not even necessary to download content from Usenet and is not, as BREIN claims, an “entertainment shopping” service from where movies can be downloaded.

As part of their argument, BREIN referred to an earlier legal battle between FTD and the movie studio, Eyeworks.

In that case, a court ruled that by allowing the publication of ‘spots’ detailing the location of an unauthorized movie stored on Usenet, FTD effectively became the publisher of that movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.

“The court in The Hague already determined that FTD provided access to unauthorized copies of a Dutch movie,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak in a statement.

“FTD is like a downloadshop providing access keys to unauthorized content. Therefore BREIN agrees with the court in The Hague that deemed FTD is making available without permission of the right holder and therefore directly infringing copyright itself even though the content itself is stored and downloaded from Usenet.”

Coincidentally, the appeal of that particular decision will be heard this week in The Hague. Needless to say, the outcome could prove of particular relevance to this case.

BREIN argued in court Monday that FTD is a portal which “organizes and promotes” illicit content making it easy for users to download it from Usenet. The anti-piracy group said that this “unlocking” of newsgroup content by FTD amounts to them publishing it and asked the judge to consider that in the light of the Eyeworks ruling, not only is FTD illegal but also a direct infringer of copyright.

Even if the Court does not eventually consider FTD to be a direct infringer, BREIN says that FTD still acts in a similar manner to other sites who have previously lost lawsuits in The Netherlands including Zoekmp3, ShareConnector, Mininova and The Pirate Bay. The anti-piracy group argued that all of these sites illegally used the availability of copyright content as a business model.

“In previous cases courts ruled that comparable business models were acting unlawful without saying the activity amounted to direct infringement,” Kuik told us yesterday.

“The point is that such business models structurally make use of the availability of unauthorized content. Even if it is not deemed infringement itself, it still is unlawful,” he added.

In an apparent reference to the earlier “filtering” rulings handed down against both Mininova and The Pirate Bay, BREIN argued in court that FTD should also have to check (filter/moderate) the potential copyright status of material before allowing the publication of their Usenet locations.

BREIN said that moderation of ‘spots’ does take place on the FTD service, but only on quality grounds, never due to copyright concerns.

Countering, FTD insist that since it is legal to download copyrighted material in The Netherlands, they have no duty to remove such ‘spots’. BREIN, however, see things differently and believe that commercial use of illicit material constitutes an infringement of copyright.

Lawyer Gijsbert Brunt reiterated that FTD is not responsible for the material uploaded to, or downloaded from, Usenet.

The Court’s decision is due to be handed down on or soon after 7th November 2010.

Source: BREIN and Usenet Portal Face Off In Court Over Legality

Because the operators of the site fail to take the site offline in The Netherlands, BREIN has extended its focus to Internet providers. This tactic has been pioneered successfully in both Italy and Denmark, but today The Hague’s Court decided that The Pirate Bay wont be blocked in The Netherlands.

BREIN wanted the largest ISP in The Netherlands, Ziggo, to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay, with any future domain names and IP addresses of the site to be blocked within 24 hours of notification by BREIN. The Court, however, argued that blocking all customer access to The Pirate Bay goes too far.

The Court ruled that there is no evidence that the majority of the customers are using The Pirate Bay to infringe copyright. If BREIN wants to stop the actions of individual customers it has to go after them separately. Blocking the entire Pirate Bay site is unjustified in this case, the Court concluded.

BREIN initially started a case against the ISP Ziggo, but rival XS4ALL joined to avoid a legal precedent which could have negative implications for the basic principles of the Internet. The company argued that if the case was lost, the ruling could have far-reaching consequences for both ISPs and Internet users.

With the present verdict the tide seems to be turning in Europe. In recent years both Italian and Danish providers were ordered to censor The Pirate Bay. However, in the last two weeks courts have ruled in favor of the ISPs in Belgium and The Netherlands.

Two weeks ago, BREIN’s counterpart in Belgium lost its case where it requested local ISPs to restrict user access to The Pirate Bay. A judge at the Antwerp Commercial Court rejected the blocking demands and labeled them “disproportionate”, similar to today’s verdict in The Netherlands.

Despite having lost this preliminary case, BREIN is expected to go ahead with a full trial against Ziggo. The anti-piracy outfit sees an ISP block as the only option left to stop The Pirate Bay. The verdicts they won against the site’s operators aren’t worth much since ‘the world’s most resilient torrent site’ is still very much alive in The Netherlands.

“It is unacceptable that The Pirate Bay and its administrators would walk free by hiding in Thailand and Cambodia and ignoring judgments,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik commented. “We’re not going to let this go. We have started a full trial against Ziggo and XS4ALL, but we will also appeal against today’s controversial ruling by the judge.”

Source: Dutch ISPs Don’t Have to Censor The Pirate Bay

The anti-piracy group won the case and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.

In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay had to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works and make their website inaccessible to Dutch visitors. This ruling was confirmed yesterday in a full trial by the Amsterdam Court.

The judge ruled that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court, the site’s operators assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

Previously, the defendants had argued that they were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles-based company named Reservella. The Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold. It concluded that the three defendants are responsible for the site.

In an appeal of one of the earlier cases against BREIN the defendants hired a lawyer to represent them, but in the full trial the defendants did not show up or defend themselves.

The Amsterdam Court ruled that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter will now have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day if they don’t comply. However, based on their previous inaction and the claims that they are no longer responsible for The Pirate Bay, it is unlikely that Dutch users will be cut off.

The worrying thing for other BitTorrent site owners is that BREIN might use this case as a precedent in an attempt to get other big torrent sites offline. If that’s the case, the effects of the current judgement might be more severe that they appear at the moment.

In the meantime, BREIN has been anticipating and making the best of The Pirate Bay’s lack of response by starting a lawsuit against Dutch ISP Ziggo, demanding it blocks user access to The Pirate Bay website.

Source: Court Bans The Pirate Bay From The Netherlands

Today, however, we have a big apology to make. We’ve let you all down and we’ve let ourselves down too by completely missing one of the biggest developing stories the BitTorrent world has ever known. We’ve totally neglected to cover what can only be described as a wholesale slaughter of file-sharing venues in The Netherlands, and for this we wholeheartedly apologize.

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who have previously given Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Demonoid and What.cd a hard time in varying degrees, have been busy. And when we say busy, we aren’t messing around. During the last few months it’s up for debate whether the group’s staff have had time to sleep. If they’ve even stopped to eat it would be, frankly, somewhat of a surprise.

According to BREIN, which works mainly on behalf of the Hollywood studios but has branched out to work for other rights holders in recent times, during the first half of 2010 it shut down a staggering 422 “illegal websites”.

While the whole world was focused on the U.S. Government taking down less than 10 sites this year but making a huge song and dance about it, BREIN was quietly showing them how it’s really done.

In addition to 5 Usenet indexers, 6 streaming sites, a FTP server, and 29 sites linking to material on one-click hosters, this most prolific and apparently effective of anti-piracy groups took down 384 torrent sites in the last 6 months. That’s more than 2 torrent sites culled every day this year and we’ve failed to report on just about every one of them.

In an attempt to fill this gap, TorrentFreak contacted BREIN boss Tim Kuik for information but we didn’t do very well at all. We were told that they aren’t releasing the URLs of the sites since they only detail those that they take to court and naming them would only give them increased traction and popularity.

We also tried to find out their names through our own network but yet again we failed miserably. For this we apologize. A bloodbath going on under our noses, in our own community, we didn’t even notice and we still can’t give you details since it appears all the corpses have been buried in unmarked graves surrounded by a wall of silence.

The worst part is that this failing on our part is nothing new. All the signs were there a few months ago that BREIN was capable of carrying out yet another massacre in 2010, just as they did last year.

In 2009, BREIN said it shut down 35 eD2K servers, 38 streaming video sites and 14 Usenet portals/NZB sites. It also took responsibility for the destruction of an unprecedented 393 BitTorrent sites. We didn’t notice, but strangely neither did anyone else.

So what were we able to find out about the closures?

“The take down most often takes place through the hosting provider,” Kuik told TorrentFreak. “We also obtain identity details from the hosting providers but these sites tend to register under a false name. If the site changes to another hosting provider, we will contact that provider. In case all else fails we will go for blocking of the site by access providers. Currently there is court case pending about that.”

If BREIN is allowed to continue this rampage there won’t be any torrent sites left by 2012 and we’ll be left with literally nothing to report on. TorrentFreak will die, but really we only have ourselves to blame. Nearly 800 torrent sites gone already and not a whisper from us? A shameful performance. We’ll try to improve, for all our sakes.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Stuns The World With Torrent Site Massacre

In the criminal case the operator of ShareConnector came out as the winner in 2007 and was released from all charges. However, after two years of waiting the Department of Justice decided to appeal the case. The site’s operator aDi was charged with membership of a criminal organization and assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material.

After having heard the case two months ago, the Court of The Hague has now decided to adjourn the case and reopen the proceedings. In quite an unusual move the Court has summoned public prosecutor R. Smits as a witness.

The Court wants the prosecutor to explain why the Department of Justice decided to go through with criminal proceedings in a case where a civil one would seem to be more suited. In The Netherlands copyright infringement related offenses fall under civil law unless they are very severe, which doesn’t seem to be the case here.

In addition, the Court weighs in that the evidence in this case has been collected by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN instead of the local authorities.

All these issues have been brought up several times by the defense lawyers, who have claimed numerous times that the Department of Justice has been ‘used’ by BREIN. In 2007 this led to the release of all charges against Shareconnector’s operator.

In this initial verdict the Court concluded that the authorities failed to provide any evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement nor enough to prove that it was criminal in nature. In addition, the judge ruled that the initial arrests were unlawful as the evidence provided by BREIN was insufficient.

This time around it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if the case again results in a victory for aDi.

“All in all this court decision could very well lead to the final judgment concluding the suspects unfit to plead because of the terribly unjust raids and lack of genuine investigation,” said aDi commenting on the Court’s actions.

“Is the world finally going to see the major mistakes the Department of Justice is covering up? Hopefully it won’t take another 6 years to get this simple truth outside.”

Source: Court Doubts Legitimacy of ShareConnector Shutdown

In this case the “making available” wasn’t hosting or storing the movie, nor was it offering torrent or NZB links to it either. FTD allows users to report (or ‘spot’) the locations of files which exist on Usenet. It is the publication of this information which Eyeworks was seeking to stop, an activity it believes is tantamount to publishing the movie itself.

In early May the case was heard at a court in The Hague. FTD lost the case and the court issued an ‘ex parte injunction’ (one handed down without any FTD involvement) which banned the site from ‘spotting’ the Eyeworks movie.

Through its lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, FTD filed an objection on the basis that the provisional measure should not have been issued under Dutch law. That objection was heard and the decision was delivered yesterday – FTD lost again.

“I am flabbergasted by the court’s reasoning,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak. “It is established caselaw that publishing hyperlinks or torrents (Mininova, Pirate Bay) is *not* the same as a publication. FTD does *less* than what Mininova or Pirate Bay does, but according to the court we are more liable than they are?”

In coming to its decision, the court drew heavily on the earlier Newzbin case.

“They say that FTD is doing the same thing, and since the English courts held Newzbin liable for infringement, FTD must be liable too,” Engelfriet explains. “This completely ignores the technical differences between Newzbin and FTD. Newzbin is an NZB search engine through which you find codes to directly download from Usenet. FTD is a forum where people ‘spot’ movies using messages in ordinary Dutch.”

FTD had argued that it was not guilty of “making available” because copyrighted files on Usenet are not under its control – it does not control the servers and it has no influence over potential downloaders. The court decided that this is irrelevant. What is important, it said, is “whether the behavior of FTD allows users to download copyrighted files (in an easier manner) and thus makes such files available to the public.” The court ruled that it did.

“This is a collaboration between FTD and its users where they knowingly provide access to unauthorized files,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a comment. “It’s clear that this is more than just talking about files like FTD wants people to believe.“

In October this year FTD will face another court case. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN says that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal, and wants the entire site shut down.

Source: Publishing Locations Of Pirate Movies Is The Same As Hosting Them

That action was forced by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN who are making more than their fair share of headlines recently, and who are about to make even more. While successfully demanding that Mininova remove links to infringing content, BREIN have never really made inroads into getting the actual infringing content removed from the Internet – but all that could be about to change.

In a fairly bold move even by their standards, the anti-piracy group headed up by Tim Kuik has initiated legal action to force a Usenet service provider, much like Giganews or Newshosting, to start proactively filtering content from the worldwide newsgroup system.

The small seven-employee Usenet company News-Service.com is being sued by BREIN on claims that it facilitates copyright infringement and is demanding that the company ceases to offer copyright material or face fines of 50,000 euros per day.

Technical director of News-Service.com Patrick Schreurs strongly refutes BREIN’s claims and says that his company only provides access to Usenet and maintains that it is a mere conduit of information.

“BREIN’s move is comparable to suing a postal service for shipping illicit goods,” he said.

Schreurs’ assertion that trying to check up to 20 million daily Usenet messages is an impossibility raises a very real concern. If a legal requirement to filter perfectly, as was the case with Mininova, is implemented against News-Service (on pain of 50,000 euros per day in fines) the company could not carry this burden for long. If BREIN gets their way, Schreurs says the company will have to stop providing Usenet access.

News-Service already operates a Notice-and-Takedown system but, as was the case with Mininova, BREIN is not satisfied with its scope or performance.

“We were under the assumption that with this procedure we met the wishes of BREIN and that we would work on a solution together,” said Schreurs. “We regret the fact that BREIN has chosen a different course with this [legal] action.”

The case, the first of its type against a Usenet provider in The Netherlands, was heard on April 19th and the judge is expected to announce his decision early next month.

Source: BREIN Wants Usenet Provider To Start Filtering

BREIN’s lawyer argued that since The Pirate Bay is responsible for millions of copyright infringements every day, the site should be blocked to visitors from The Netherlands.

BREIN won that case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to block Dutch users before March 1st 2010 or face penalties of 5,000 euros per person, per day.

The defendants, who claimed they were not responsible for the site’s operations, announced they would not appeal the decision. However, since they said they were no longer involved with the site, they therefore don’t have the ability to block Dutch users either. Indeed, The Pirate Bay remains accessible to the Dutch to this day.

But of course, there is another technique which the movie industry can use to have sites blocked which doesn’t involve suing sites like The Pirate Bay. As pioneered in several other countries by the music industry, BREIN appears to be going after Dutch ISPs.

According to information received by TorrentFreak, BREIN has begun threatening Dutch ISP Ziggo in an attempt to force them to block The Pirate Bay. Ziggo is the largest cable Internet provider in The Netherlands and in 2009 pulled in nearly 1.3 billion euros in revenue from its 7.2 million Internet, TV and telephone customers.

Our source, who has provided us with credible information in the past, says that BREIN is demanding that Ziggo implements a block on the following grounds:

1. The Pirate Bay is guilty of large scale copyright infringement
2. The Pirate Bay founders have been convicted
3. The Pirate Bay refuses to work with rights holders to solve piracy issues
4. Ziggo can easily block the site with simple technical measures.

BREIN is apparently threatening Ziggo with Article 6:162 of the Dutch Civil Code which reads:

“A person who commits an unlawful act against another which is attributable to him, must repair the damage suffered by the other in consequence thereof.”

To this end, BREIN wants Ziggo to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay, with any future domain names and IP addresses of the site to be blocked within 24 hours of notification by BREIN. This demand is similar to a court order that is currently in effect in Italy, one that is also easy to bypass for tech-savvy users.

TorrentFreak contacted BREIN boss Tim Kuik who politely told us that he had no comment.

At the time of publication a request to Ziggo’s press office for comment remains unanswered.

Update: Ziggo is refusing to co-operate with BREIN’s request.

“There is no legal basis for this request,” says a Ziggo announcement. “We are just a conduit. We provide people access to the Internet and have nothing to do with that website. Moreover, we favor public Internet.”

Source: BREIN Wants Dutch ISP To Block The Pirate Bay

NFOrce communicated this request to the owner of the site, who had no other option than to move his site to a hosting provider outside The Netherlands. The alternative – facing legal battle against BREIN in court – was not a viable option for the site’s operator.

Soon after BREIN’s request, Torrentbit moved to a Swedish hosting provider, hoping that its issues with BREIN were solved. Previously, many sites have moved outside The Netherlands after threats from BREIN, including BTjunkie, Demonoid and What.cd.

Relocating has solved the issues for the aforementioned sites, but not for Torrentbits. Aside from using NFOrce as a hosting provider, the company also acted as the domain registrar for the .nl domain the site was using. So, in a second attempt to shut Torrentbit down, BREIN sent a request to NFOrce to make the domain unavailable.

NFOrce did not comply with this request immediately, but saw no other option than to do so if Torrentbit’s owners did not make their identity know to BREIN so they could fight this out between themselves. Again, this was not a viable option for the Torrentbit administrator.

“In order to be confident of my site’s future I decided to change domain to a .net extension and make it not so dependent on Dutch laws and existing court decisions,” Torrentbit founder Torro told TorrentFreak when explaining the recent domain change.

Torrentbit continues to operate just fine, but one has to wonder where this will end now domain registrars are becoming a target as well. For now these actions seem to be limited to The Netherlands and Russia, but in the United States the RIAA and MPAA are lobbying for registrars to disable ‘infringing’ sites as well.

It is obvious that BREIN is very creative in using verdicts of previous court cases as ammunition to put pressure on webhosting companies and also domain registrars. With two hosting providers having lost their cases against BREIN in court, it seems that most others would rather comply than put up a costly fight.

Source: Anti-Piracy Outfit Chases Torrent Site Domain Registrar

With their increasing popularity among the masses it is inevitable that eBooks will become more widely pirated online. At the moment though, largely due to the fact that a relatively small number of people have eBook readers, piracy remains fairly low.

Having kept a close eye on the state of music piracy, where small files are traded with ease and at will, some book publishers have already taken action against sites which have assisted in the spread of electronic books.

In 2008, the 100,000 member TextBoook Torrents finally folded under the threat of lawsuits and in February this year several large book publishers filed a lawsuit against file-hosting site, RapidShare.

Their lawsuit cited 148 book titles and demanded that RapidShare stop them being made available to the public via their service. The District Court in Hamburg handed down a preliminary ruling against RapidShare which granted the request.

Now the signs are that other publishers are digging their trenches ready for a battle.

Publishers association GAU has just announced that it began working with anti-piracy group BREIN this month. Together they will attempt to combat the online piracy of eBooks in a pilot exercise which will last until at least January 2011.

In keeping with the skills it acquired going after dozens of lesser known file-sharing sites and forums offering links to movies, BREIN will now also monitor the Internet for sites and services facilitating the spread of eBooks. BitTorrent, Usenet and various other file-sharing sites will be targeted, including forums which offer links to material on sites such as Rapidshare. The file-hosters themselves will also be ordered to remove infringing content, rendering undiscovered links useless.

For smaller infringements it’s believed BREIN will issue a takedown request, but for the bigger ones it can be presumed that BREIN will operate as normal, by using existing legal decisions to force site owners to close their operations under the threat of overwhelming legal might. According to GAU, BREIN have already had some successes but it is believed these are against individuals selling illegal copies of eBooks rather than giving them away for free.

Not everyone in the book industry is equally excited about BREIN’s expansion plans. Author Karin Spaink is one of the most vocal opponents. “I don’t want my intellectual property rights to be abused by BREIN so they can restrict your and my civil rights,” she wrote in a recent blog post.

For BREIN, however, it makes perfect sense to bring in new clients to help cover increasing legal costs. After all, if they are to take down a site (such as the recent MasterNZB) for infringing movie copyrights, why not bring in another paymaster and take it down for infringing eBook copyrights at the same time? Even more revenue for the same amount of work sounds like a very good business plan.

Source: BREIN Extends Anti-Piracy Activities To eBook Sector

What followed was more than 5 years of legal battles in both civil and criminal court cases. In the criminal case the operator of ShareConnector came out as the winner in 2007 and was released from all charges.

The court ruled that the authorities failed to provide any evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement nor enough to prove that it was criminal in nature. In addition, the judge ruled that the initial arrests were unlawful as the evidence provided by BREIN was insufficient.

After this decision ShareConnector came back online. However, this comeback was short lived as local anti-piracy outfit BREIN initiated a civil lawsuit, trying to prevent the operator from keeping the site up and running. This lawsuit was won by BREIN but the ShareConnector operator decided to appeal the ruling.

This week a court announced the verdict of the appeal and it came out negative once again. Although the court ruled that the operator of ShareConnector wasn’t guilty of copyright infringement, it said the site must remain closed for good. The judge ruled that sites that offer hash links (like .torrent links) are facilitating copyright infringement, an unlawful behavior.

The outcome of the case is disappointing to aDI, the operator of the site, who further said that it didn’t surprise him. He had hoped, however, that the ruling in the appeal would be in line with recent cases in Spain where P2P indexing sites were deemed legal.

“The results are just what I expected, so nothing surprising here considering all the similar recent cases with just about the same conclusion we see here. The trend has been set by those ignorant old judges that fail to see the logic, contradicting the rulings from Spain,” said aDi in a response to the verdict.

“Unfortunately this is not Spain, the Dutch legal system is dysfunctional, lacking logic and professionalism. Why does it take more than five years and so many criminal trials to prove a simple fact? How come all the pathetic private organizations whose main interest is money and not the artists, get away with lies and deceptions spreading their propaganda in the media?,” he added.

What remains for the ShareConnector operator is the appeal of the criminal case that will be heard in April. In 2007 he was released from all charges, but after two years the Department of Justice filed the appeal. The charges in this case are membership of a criminal organization and (assisting in) the distribution of copyrighted material. The additional charges of copyright infringement were dropped last week.

In the upcoming trial Dr. Johan Pouwelse will appear as an expert witness on behalf of the defendant. Since downloading copyrighted films and music is not illegal in The Netherlands, he is expected to testify that there are various ways for eDonkey users to disable the upload feature. Whatever the outcome of the criminal trial, ShareConnector will never return.

Source: Court Shuts ShareConnector Down For Good

In its verdict the Court ruled that the three defendants had to remove a list of torrents from The Pirate Bay that link to copyrighted works. The three defendants and the site itself were not found guilty of copyright infringement, but according to the Court, The Pirate Bay assists in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

The Court gave the defendants until March 1 to remove a list of infringing torrents and to block Dutch users from accessing parts of the site where (.torrent) links to copyrighted files can be downloaded. If the three did not comply they would face penalties of 3,000 euros per person, per day.

This ultimatum passed today and thus far no changes have been made to The Pirate Bay. Dutch users can still access all parts of the site and from the looks of it no torrent files have been removed. To the three defendants this comes as no surprise because they always claimed that they have no control over the site anymore.

Peter Sunde, former Pirate Bay spokesman and one of the defendants in this case, told TorrentFreak last week that he doubted that anything would change. Sunde also repeated what was said in Court by their lawyers. The three defendants are no longer in charge of The Pirate Bay and can’t comply with the Court order even if they wanted to.

For BREIN, who celebrated the verdict as a grand victory, The Pirate Bay’s continued operation in The Netherlands is likely to be received as a huge setback. TorrentFreak contacted BREIN director Tim Kuik for a response to the news but we haven’t heard back from him at time of publication.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay remains the most popular BitTorrent site in The Netherlands where the site is listed in the top 50 of most visited sites on the Internet, beating Microsoft’s search engine Bing.com.

Source: The Pirate Bay Torrents Remain Online Despite Court Order

It is difficult to downplay this success. BREIN must have been absolutely delighted that all their hard work and investment had paid off, stopping Mininova in its tracks just a short time after the site had served up its 10 billionth torrent.

The Dutch anti-piracy group also had a fairly significant victory over The Pirate Bay. In common with the earlier decision against Mininova, a Dutch Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works by 1st March 2010.

While it had a win over Mininova and a limited win over The Pirate Bay, both of which attracted mountains of press, it seems the Netherlands-based group has been hiding its biggest successes from almost everyone.

According to figures just released by BREIN, the group shut down a staggering 615 “illegal websites” in 2009 and, apparently, BitTorrent sites made up the majority.

TorrentFreak knew that BREIN had shut down a handful of torrent sites, 19 very small sites for example (plus TorrentVault which was targeted but still operates today via Sweden), but we were absolutely oblivious to the sheer numbers now being claimed.

Total BitTorrent sites BREIN said it closed down in 2009 – a staggering 393.

And it doesn’t stop there. The anti-piracy group also says it shut down 35 eD2K servers, 38 streaming video sites and 14 Usenet portals/NZB sites.

While these closures would have no doubt been very noticeable for those that used the sites and services in question, one has to question how many people were actually using them. Unfortunately, we’re a little bit in the dark, since aside from the sites we mentioned above, a grand total of zero emails flooded into TorrentFreak during 2009 requesting information on the other several hundred closures.

So, if you know any of those we haven’t listed, please post them in the comments. We’d love to know exactly how much damage these closures did to BitTorrent. Our suspicions at this point are, not very much at all.

Source: BREIN Shuts Down 393 Torrent Sites, No One Notices

Talking about copyrighted content on Usenet is illegal they argue, and BREIN wants FTD to be shut down for allowing this. The newsgroup community, however, is not prepared to tolerate BREIN’s accusations and has decided to take action. Earlier this year FTD took BREIN to court, demanding that it should retract its numerous statements that FTD operates illegally.

In a letter to the court in this ongoing case, FTD’s lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet stated yesterday that BREIN is going too far with its statements. Downloading copyrighted files and music for personal use is perfectly legal in The Netherlands, so he sees no reason why merely talking about it should be illegal.

FTD users do not ‘make files available’ and are therefore not acting against the law. “Hyperlinks, torrents, NZB-files or other technical possibilities to download copyrighted works are not provided. BREIN says in effect that it should be forbidden to talk about downloading material,” Engelfriet added.

Undeterred, BREIN maintained their stance and declared FTD a criminal operation. In a counter-claim against FTD, the anti-piracy outfit has demanded $70,000 a day in penalties if the Usenet chatter continues.

Needless to say, if BREIN wins their case this will have serious implications for many other websites and communities, including TorrentFreak. Simply mentioning that a movie such as 2012 can be downloaded through BitTorrent would no longer be allowed according to Engelfriet.

FTD’s lawyer is confident about the positive outcome of the case, arguing that FTD is operating within the boundaries of Dutch copyright law.

“We fully expect to win our case. BREIN is big on statements but often short on facts and legal arguments to back them up,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak earlier, adding that they “have the law and the facts” on their side.

The verdict in this case is expected to be announced sometime next year. Until then, here’s our Usenet tutorial.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Wants To Ban You From Talking About Usenet

In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works.

This list is to be provided by BREIN, which is similar to the earlier ruling against Mininova. The three defendants were given three months to comply, facing penalties of 3000 euros per person, per day.

In addition to removing the torrents, the defendants were ordered to block Dutch users from accessing certain parts of the site where it’s possible for them to download torrents which link to copyright works.

Ernst-Jan Louwers, the lawyer for the three Pirate Bay defendants, initially told TorrentFreak that his clients were considering an appeal against this judgment, but according to a BREIN press release issued today, this is not going to happen.

BREIN says the whereabouts of the three defendants is currently unknown, and unfindable even for their own lawyer. Because of this, BREIN used Twitter again to notify them about the verdict, which is now final. Earlier this year BREIN has also served the defendants though twitter, but these notifications went unnoticed.

The defendants now have until the 1st March 2010 to comply with the Court’s orders. Whether or not they can actually remove any torrents is doubtful. Thus far the defendants have argued that they do not control or own the website.

Source: The Pirate Bay Will Not Appeal Order to Remove Torrents

This week the appeal was heard before the Amsterdam court. BREIN’s lawyer tried to convince the judge that the three are responsible for the site’s daily operations. Lawyer Ernst-Jan Louwers on the other hand represented the Pirate Bay defendants, arguing that BREIN sued the wrong people.

In addition, Louwers revealed that BREIN brought in a credit report, apparently faked in an attempt to mislead the court. The report in question shows Fredrik Neij as the CEO of Seychelles-based Reservella, the company believed to own The Pirate Bay.

This misstep by BREIN was pointed out to the court, and former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde later wrote a detailed article summing up the inconsistencies. Now, a few days later everyone can see for themselves that the report is not what its supposed to be.

The documents prooving that the evidence presented by BREIN was false have now been exposed, on The Pirate Bay of course. The ‘leaked’ torrent (mirror) contains the following information:

- A fax of the Experian report as sent by BREIN.
- A pdf version of the Experian report with the unedited footer.
- A fax from Mossack Fonseca stating that they never acted as registered agent as the report claims.
- A document from the authorities stating that the company registered with the ID 32549 is NOT Reservella.

TorrentFreak contacted BREIN for a response to the alleged misstep, and director Tim Kuik told us that the Experian report was not used by their lawyer in court because there was already sufficient evidence that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter are responsible for The Pirate Bay.

“Denying their responsibility and playing hide and seek is what the gentlemen of The Pirate Bay have been doing since they began their illegal business”, said Kuik. “We have sufficient reason to assume that they are still responsible.”

“The company in the Seychelles looks like a thin veil to cover up what is really going on and it appears that they too like to play hide and seek just like the gents from The Pirate Bay,” he added.

The lawyer for the defendants totally disagrees with BREIN’s assessment. Aside from BREIN’s alleged attempt to fabricate evidence, he told the court that the three defendants are not the owners of the site. Even if they were, The Pirate Bay in itself is not illegal because it’s merely one of many distribution platforms that are available on the Internet, the lawyer told the court.

Whose side the court will take and whether or not the alleged attempt to manipulate evidence will be taken into account will be known in two weeks, when the appeal verdict is set to be announced.

Source: Fabricated Anti Pirate Bay Evidence Leaks Onto….

After the verdict was made public, the three defendants immediately announced they would appeal.

Lawyer Ernst-Jan Louwers represented the Pirate Bay defendants in the appeal today, and he revealed that BREIN brought in documents that are apparently faked in an attempt to mislead the court.

BREIN submitted a report on Reservella to the court. Reservella is the company that planned to sell The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory, and according to the report that was apparently written by UK company Experian, one of the Pirate Bay founders is the company’s CEO.

However, the defendants lawyer presented several facts that showed that the report is not what it claims to be.

“The report is an attempt to mislead the Court,” Louwers said, adding that the Court should reject it since it’s “fake, deceptive and completely unreliable.”

The lawyer went on to argue that the anti-piracy outfit is merely trying to save face, and that BREIN will do all it can to succeed in their crusade against the three defendants. He then goes through a list of several points that show why the evidence is fabricated.

First of all, the Experian report on Reservella seems to have copied the Whois data of the Pirate Bay domain. It lists defendant Fredrik Neij as the CEO and the formation date for the company is identical to the date when the domain was registered.

This makes no sense, as Reservella was founded less than a year ago according to official information from the Seychelles Government, and Neij is not linked to the company as the report claims.

If that isn’t enough already, the company ID number as reported in the document is incorrect, and the claims that Fredrik Neij is a citizen of the Seychelles are even more absurd.

Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is outraged by BREIN’s attempt to cheat their way into a victory, and will press charges against BREIN and its director Tim Kuik.

“I consider what they have done as criminal. Much more severe than any ‘aiding with potential copyright infringement’ could ever be,” he writes, adding “Maybe then we can finally have the real criminals shut down and put in jail!”

In his writeup Peter himself sums up various other points showing that the document is apparently false.

All in all there seems to be clear evidence that the report is highly inaccurate. Even if all the errors can be attributed to the research company, BREIN should have known better since they have been tracking The Pirate Bay’s every move for years.

Developing story…

Source: Anti-Pirates Try to Nail The Pirate Bay with Faked Evidence

In a response to this new setup, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN asked Leaseweb to stop passing on traffic to the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

Although Leaseweb doesn’t allow torrent sites to be hosted on its network, they also said that they are not responsible for traffic they pass on to other parts of the Internet, and as such have no plans to disconnect The Pirate Bay.

“The Pirate Bay is hosted on a different autonomous system (AS). LeaseWeb is not the host, and our client [NForce] is not hosting The Pirate Bay either. We are only the IP Transit supplier, or carrier of Internet traffic for a company that uses our carrier services,” Alex de Joode, Security Officer of Leaseweb told ISPam.

BREIN of course disagreed with Leaseweb’s position and demanded that Leaseweb’s client NForce stopped routing traffic to The Pirate Bay. And they succeeded. A few hours ago NForce disconnected The Pirate Bay and at the time of writing the site is inaccessible in most parts of the world, if not all.

“We summoned NForce to stop the routing and they complied,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a response.

This case is a rather unique one that sets a disturbing precedent. In fact, it’s the first time that an ISP that merely routes traffic has decided to disable access to a BitTorrent site. In theory this could make it very easy for BREIN to shut down hundreds of other BitTorrent sites that are routed through Dutch networks, if they can strike enough fear into carriers.

There is no doubt that The Pirate Bay will resurface soon with a slightly altered setup, but if anti-piracy outfits such as BREIN start to go after data carriers it will become increasingly difficult to find alternatives.

Update: The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that the site will be back online with 4 new transits tomorrow. The current downtime is not (only) related to the routing issue, but rather with the new hosting company. Everything should be back to normal soon.

Source: BREIN Disconnects The Pirate Bay, For Now

Today, the judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer has been ordered to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content.

BREIN’s intention was not to shut down the site. Instead, the organization called for a filter based on infringing keywords and possibly digital fingerprints to guarantee that the rights holders have sufficient means to protect their content.

The court agreed with BREIN’s assessment that Mininova is not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and ordered the site to remove all torrent files that link to infringing content within three months, or pay a penalty of 1000 Euro per infringing torrent with a maximum of 5 million euros ($7 million).

Mininova’s notice and takedown policy that allows copyright holders to remove infringing torrents is not sufficient, the court said. Interestingly, the recently announced copyright filter that Mininova launched together with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) wasn’t mentioned in the verdict.

The court did not agree with Mininova’s defense that it is impossible to moderate all torrents that are uploaded to the site. It further said that Mininova is encouraging its users to download copyrighted material, helped by the several moderators that the site has in place.

The moderators keep the site clean and ‘family friendly’ by removing torrents that link to adult content, viruses and fake files. They do this proactively and in response to user feedback, the court concluded, pointing out that they should also be able to moderate torrents that link to copyrighted material.

It was further concluded that Mininova profits from copyright infringement though the ads that appear on the site.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said in a response: “We are obviously not happy with the verdict.” Mininova is considering to appeal the decision, which they have to do within three months

Developing story.

Source: Mininova Ordered to Remove All ‘Infringing’ Torrents

GGF’s proposed notice and takedown is in fact not very different from those operated already by sites such as Mininova. What they add is the option for copyright holders to keep their content on the site and get paid for it. Plus, the users have to pay a monthly fee to use the site.

As one of our commenters put it yesterday: “Cool, a paid private tracker without dedicated servers or seed-ratio enforcement, and with arbitrary censorship.”

And the users of the site are not the only ones who are complaining. In response to GGF’s plans, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, that acts on behalf of the music, movie and gaming industries, issued a press release today in which they argue that the plans for the new Pirate Bay are not sufficient to please the copyright holders.

“In the proposed system the right holder must detect illegal content on the website and remove it. That is insufficient,” BREIN director Tim Kuik says. “This sort of Notice and Take Down system works in case of incidental infringement but not for the structural infringement that happens at The Pirate Bay.”

“The point is that The Pirate Bay is responsible for what happens on the site. They must keep preventive supervision and take care that no illegal torrents become available on the site. The site provides access to content which to an important and even overwhelming extent is illegal,” Kuik continued.

“So they can not assume that there is permission and leave it up to the right holders to check continuously for infringements. It is their site, their business and so their job to clean it up and keep it clean”, Kuik added, demanding a stricter removal system.

BREIN’s response makes sense from their perspective, since they have a pending court case in which they demand a proactive content removal system from the Dutch-based torrent site Mininova, who already have quite an elaborate content removal system in place.

GGF’s CEO was contacted for a comment on BREIN’s response, and we will add that to the article once it comes in. It is clear though that not all copyright holders are wildly enthusiastic about the plans for the new Pirate Bay.

Source: BREIN Not Impressed With New Pirate Bay Plans

BREIN had successfully convinced the FIOD-ECD – Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police – to shut down both sites and take the servers into custody for a thorough inspection, hoping to find traces of criminal activities.

When the case finally went to court, the result for BREIN and the FIOD-ECD was a disaster. The admin of ShareConnector was found completely innocent and just a couple of small fines of approximately $350 were handed out to the admins of Releases4U for uploading copyright material.

The court ruled that FIOD-ECD failed to provide any evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement nor enough to prove that either organization was criminal in nature. In addition, the judge ruled that the initial arrests were unlawful as the evidence provided by BREIN was insufficient.

Despite this setback the Department of Justice announced back in 2007 that it would appeal the verdict, but in the years that followed nothing happened, until today. More than two years after the ShareConnector admin was released from all charges, the Department of Justice filed the appeal.

One can only wonder why it took this long. The case itself and the evidence presented during the trial hasn’t changed. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is the media attention on file-sharing cases and the increased efforts of organizations such as BREIN to take on sites that host links to copyright infringing works.

The ShareConnector admin, who briefly put his site back online in 2007 before BREIN managed to close it through a civil dispute, told TorrentFreak that he was surprised to find out that the case will be appealed after all.

“It’s understandable that the DoJ tries everything in their power to cover up their illegal, unprofessional and unfair doings by spreading misinforming propaganda in the mainstream news. They can’t deal with such issues because they don’t know what the Internet is about, nor do they seem to care,” the admin told TorrentFreak.

“They failed before and they will fail again. It’s about time they realize that you can’t control the future, if you don’t understand the past,” he added.

Besides the appeal of the criminal trial, ShareConnector will also be facing BREIN again as the site’s admin decided to appeal the earlier decision that forced him to close the site. “This year is really packed with lawsuits for me with hopefully some conclusive results about the legality of eD2k indexing sites in the Netherlands,” he writes.

Source: ShareConnector Case Appealed After Two Years

For now the verdict has been put on hold by BREIN, allowing the three defendants to appeal. Nevertheless, because of the legal issues between the two parties, an encounter between the head of BREIN, Tim Kuik and Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm that took place at Hacking at Random (HAR) this Friday was a rather interesting one.

Tim Kuik participated in a panel discussion on copyright laws and the future of media distribution at HAR, and halfway through he was standing face to face with Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Svartholm, who had been following the discussion in the audience, took the opportunity to confront Kuik with some of the allegations he made.

Svartholm started by asking if BREIN actually has any evidence that The Pirate Bay is making ‘a lot’ of money from distributing copyrighted works, as they claim. “Can you please tell me where that profit is, because i’d like some of it,” he asked, which resulted in applause and cheers from the audience.

“You tell me, you’re here, somebody paid for your trip,” Kuik quickly replied in an attempt to turn things around, implying that Svartholm must have used Pirate Bay revenue to make his way over to The Netherlands.

Svartholm, who currently works as a software programmer in Asia where he earns his living, then replied, “I paid for this trip by developing computer software for my customers,” which was again followed by applause from the audience.

Kuik found his argument crushed so reverted back to the earlier question about profits. “Everybody knows, including yourself, that you’re selling advertising space on your website, and people pay you for that,” he said.

Kuik went on to say that a Swedish investigative journalist found that The Pirate Bay made hundreds of thousands of kroner every year. To some this may sound like an impressive figure, but 300,000 kroner ($40,000) may not even be enough to cover the hardware and bandwidth costs, so it doesn’t prove that there’s any profit.

From Kuik’s responses it seems that BREIN has no evidence at all that The Pirate Bay is as profitable as they claim it is, so Svartholm went on to ask Kuik about the defamation lawsuit that the former Pirate Bay founders started against him and his organization.

The head of BREIN is being sued by TPB in Sweden for defamation, after Kuik claimed that the Pirate Bay founders were responsible for an alleged DDoS attack on BREIN’s website. In Sweden, Kuik is now facing up to two years in prison, and Svartholm wanted to know if he plans to show up.

In his reply, Kuik denied that he ever attributed the DDoS attacks to the people behind the Pirate Bay, but he said that it was a coincidence that their website was hit right after the case against TPB was announced to the press. Svartholm of course questioned Kuik’s denial, but he never saw his original question answered.

In the end, Kuik never answered any of the questions posed by Svartholm, but the face to face standoff between two people at the extreme ends of the copyright debate was an interesting one nonetheless. After the panel discussion, Tim Kuik and Gottfrid Svartholm set their differences aside for a brief moment, as they posed for the cameras.

The video of the HAR panel discussion is available in OGG and on Vimeo (Gottfrid at 30:20).

Source: Pirate Bay and BREIN Clash at Hacker Conference