TorrentFreak

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.

In 2007 the admin of the eDonkey link site ‘ShareConnector’ was found not guilty in a criminal trial that was built around a lead from the dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. Now, nearly five years after the case started and two years after the initial court ruling, the Department of Justice announced that it will appeal the verdict.

Tim Kuik, head of Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, had a brief encounter with Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm (Anakata) on Friday. The two met at Hacking at Random, an outdoor hacker conference that currently takes place in The Netherlands, where Kuik took part in one of the panel discussions.

Two weeks ago the Amsterdam Court ruled that The Pirate Bay must cease all operations in The Netherlands. The case, brought by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, will be appealed by the defendants. Their newly found lawyer has already got BREIN to agree that the site will remain accessible to Dutch users for the time being.

Last week the Amsterdam Court issued a default judgment in favor of BREIN versus The Pirate Bay, ordering the site to be blocked in The Netherlands because the defendants didn’t show up. In a response to this verdict, The Dutch Consumers Union says it is disappointed that the judge ruled in favor of the anti-piracy outfit without looking into the content of their demands.