The first rule of Usenet is, you don’t talk about Usenet. This rule kept Usenet providers and users out of sight from anti-piracy organizations for years. Ironically, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN are now the first ones trying to enforce this rule in court.
Last month a judge ruled that similar to Mininova, The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of ‘infringing’ torrents from their website and block access to Dutch users. Lawyers for the founders said the trio were considering filing an appeal, but according to anti-piracy outfit BREIN, that did not happen. The site now has until March 1st 2010 to comply.
This week three Pirate Bay crew members appealed the negative verdict in their controversial case against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The defendants’ lawyer claimed that the evidence presented by BREIN was faked in an attempt to mislead the court. Now these faked documents, including proof that they are, have now leaked onto The Pirate Bay.
In August, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN won its case against The Pirate Bay, and the court ordered the defendants to block access to Dutch visitors. The case was appealed today and rightly so. It appears that the evidence presented by BREIN was faked in an attempt to mislead the court.
Last Friday The Pirate Bay moved to Ukraine after its Swedish bandwidth supplier was forced to stop servicing the tracker. In the new setup, traffic to TPB is routed through The Netherlands, but anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now asked ISP NForce to stop handling TPB’s traffic. As a result the site is now down for most people.
Mininova has lost its civil dispute with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringement, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.
In an attempt to convert The Pirate Bay into a site with a seal of approval from the entertainment industry, Global Gaming Factory (GGF) said it will install a torrent removal/approval system. However, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN said today that GGF has to come up with a better plan if they want to avoid legal issues.