Torrent Site ‘Franchise’ Eliminated by BREIN
The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has managed to take another 19 torrent sites down, all of them operated by the same person. Last December, the 45 year old man behind the so-called torrent site franchise was already forced to close 75 of his other sites.
BREIN is famous for taking small torrent communities offline. However, they tend to ignore some of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, some of which are also hosted in The Netherlands. Their latest victory is a torrent site franchise, as they like to call it, involving 94 small BitTorrent trackers.
Two months ago, 75 sites involved in this franchise were already pulled offline, and this week the remaining 19 followed. All the sites were allegedly operated by the same person, a 45 year old Dutch man. BREIN, who previously said that the man was involved in an organized piracy ring, will report the man to the FIOD-ECD – the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police.
FIOD-ECD is dedicated to chasing down people alleged to be involved in fiscal, financial and economic fraud – usually major criminals or cases where a significant amount of money is involved. It therefore seems unlikely that they will pursue the man, especially since they were unable to find any evidence in previous filesharing case involving ShareConnector.
BREIN’s strength seems to be their ability to exaggerate and spin the truth in order to influence public opinion, which required us to send them an open letter some time ago. In recent years BREIN has succeeded in taking hundreds of torrent sites offline, mostly by making direct contact with the site host, who then feel they must cooperate. Unfortunately for BREIN, most sites simply responded by relocating to another hosting facility.
In 2007, MyBittorrent, SumoTorrent, BTmon.com, BTjunkie.org, SeedPeer, What.cd, Waffles.fm and many other BitTorrent sites were forced to leave Leaseweb thanks to an intervention from BREIN. Today, all these sites are still online though, which proves that BREIN’s actions are far from effective.
