Through the court BREIN demanded that NSE delete all infringing content from its servers, and in 2011 the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

The Court argued that NSE willingly facilitated copyright infringement through its services. In its verdict the Court ruled that NSE had to remove all copyrighted content, and filter future posts for possible copyright infringements.

Responding to the verdict the Usenet provider said that it was economically unfeasible to filter all messages. The company therefore saw no other option than to shut down its services while the appeal was pending.

This week the Appeals Court ruled on the case overturning the previous verdict, setting a more positive precedent for Usenet providers and similar services.

The Court concluded that NSE does not facilitate copyright infringement as long as it maintains a procedure through which copyright holders can send unlimited takedown notices.

In addition, the Court decided that proactive filtering of copyrighted content is not required, as that conflicts with existing jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice.

“We are very pleased with this ruling,” NSE CEO Patrick Schreurs says. “The Court correctly states that a Usenet provider such as News-Service Europe can not be expected to proactively monitor the messages others place.”

The ruling this week is an interlocutory verdict. The Court still has to rule on how NSE’s notice and takedown procedure should operate. Afterwards, both BREIN and NSE still have the option to take the case to the Supreme Court.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The action began when BREIN targeted Ziggo, the Netherlands’ largest ISP, in an attempt to force it to block The Pirate Bay. Ziggo were later joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL, with the pair teaming up against the prospect of a bad precedent and an avalanche of additional blocking demands.

The case has taken numerous twists and turns, with a court first deciding that blocking all subscribers was a step too far. BREIN responded to this defeat by taking the case to a full trial, which it won. The ISPs refused to give in, filing subsequent appeals on the basis that any blockade would be ineffective and would deny subscribers free access to information.

In January the Court of The Hague sided with Ziggo and XS4ALL, leaving the ISPs to unblock The Pirate Bay, an action they took immediately.

BREIN limped away with no blockade and close to half a million dollars in legal fees, but one last legal avenue remained – taking the case to the Supreme Court. According to XS4ALL, on April 25 this year it was summoned by BREIN to defend itself in the Supreme Court.

A statement issued by the ISP explains that the appeal will not see the dispute resubmitted in its entirety and judged on its merits as is often the case. Instead, the Supreme Court will only overturn the decision from January if it finds that the Court of the Hague “erred in law” or failed to comply with procedural rules.

“The facts as determined by the Court are fixed, the case will not be materially redone and the Supreme Court itself will not perform an investigation. The claimant [BREIN] cannot bring more new facts, nor contest the facts. Only the legal criteria which the Court has applied will be questioned,” the ISP explains.

“If the appeal is successful and the judgement of the lower court is set aside, it may be sufficient to conclude the case. If a new examination of the facts is necessary, the Supreme Court will probably refer back the case to the Court for a full retrial,” XS4ALL adds.

XS4ALL now has until September 5 to submit a statement for its defense.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The initial action, against Ziggo, the Netherlands’ largest ISP, soon encompassed another. XS4ALL decided the case was too important to stay out of and joined its rival to fight against BREIN. The case took many twists and turns, with victory first for the ISPs, then for BREIN. Refusing to give in, the ISPs fought back and in January The Court of The Hague delivered a huge blow.

That ruling, which deemed that ISPs did not have to block their subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay, threw BREIN’s whole strategy into turmoil. With no ruling against Ziggo and XS4ALL, BREIN would be unable to get any kind of victory against KPN, UPC and Tele2, the other ISPs the anti-piracy group had unfinished legal business with.

Things soon started to unravel. Within days UPC said it had lifted its Pirate Bay blockade and KPN and Tele2 quickly followed. Agreement with BREIN had been reached in private, with most other details unavailable.

Now, in a fresh announcement, it’s clear that BREIN will back away from all legal action against ISPs pending the Supreme Court ruling it seeks against Ziggo and XS4ALL.

“BREIN has laid the case against the other providers to rest in anticipation of the outcome at the Supreme Court,” said BREIN lawyer Joris van Manen. “The ISPs have a golden rule that they will only block under judicial coercion. BREIN, however, is reasonable.”

While the ISPs will be breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of around 18 months respite from legal action, they aren’t the only ones in the clear. BREIN says that it will also end hostilities against Pirate Bay proxies. These services, including Kuiken.co and one operated by the Pirate Party, worked hard to circumvent the now-defunct ISP blockades but were attacked for their actions.

“We’re not Don Quixote,” van Manen told Webwereld. “If there is no blockage of the Pirate Bay any more then a proxy makes little sense, and also any lawsuit against one.”

The fact that BREIN feels it has no legal basis to force proxies into compliance is very interesting. Earlier this week the anti-piracy group said it had killed in excess of 200 such sites in 2013.

Whether any will now return to their former glory remains to be seen but given that their services aren’t just of use to Dutch citizens (proxies are also very useful to Internet users in the UK) some are likely to restart their engines to operate legally from the Netherlands – at least until the Supreme Court ruling, that is.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In its new report published this week, BREIN presents a laundry list of site and service shutdowns, payment processor and advertising disruptions, plus the results of takedown campaigns directed at companies such as Google. Most of BREIN’s annual declarations contain large-scale claims and the report for 2014 continues that tradition.

Strategy

“Briefly, BREIN’s enforcement strategy is aimed at forcing illegal sites or online services into copyright compliance and fulfilling their duty of care. If not, the sites’ hosting providers could identify them or take them offline, or if that offers no solace, providers can block access to them,” BREIN explains.

In addition to identifying individuals behind sites, BREIN says it also targets their payment providers, advertisers and their intermediaries. The group also issues takedown requests, including many thousands sent to Google.

Site takedown results

In common with all previous years, BREIN has some big claims on this front. Cyberlocker linking sites were hardest hit in 2013, with BREIN claiming shutdown of 280 sites in total. The names of the sites remain a mystery, a policy maintained by BREIN throughout many years’ reports.

Moving up to the sources rather than sites that merely link to them, BREIN says it closed down 10 actual file-hosting sites. In the streaming and Usenet realms the group claims the scalps of 66 and 38 sites respectively. Again, no details are provided.

Of course, most readers will be interested in BREIN’s claims of successes against BitTorrent sites and as usual they are pretty lofty. The Hollywood-affiliated group says that it closed 118 torrent sites in 2013. Their names are…..unknown.

The big feather-in-the-cap for BREIN in 2012 was of course the blocking of The Pirate Bay, but there was less to celebrate on that front in 2013. As previously reported, all that came tumbling down in recent weeks when The Court of The Hague decided to lift the ban and restore access for Dutch citizens.

Nevertheless, in this week’s report BREIN is still claiming successes in upholding the ban throughout 2013, with claims that it took down an astonishing 206 proxy sites setup to circumvent the blockade of The Pirate Bay. Whether those sites remain down today is largely moot, as Dutch citizens can now access The Pirate Bay directly pending a Supreme Court ruling.

Advertisers, payment processors and takedown notices

A developing anti-piracy strategy is to try and cut sites off from their income. To this end BREIN says it deals with advertisers on the one hand and payment processors on the other.

The group reports that in 41 cases payment processors divulged “identifying information” and discontinued service to sites. In another 100 cases advertisers reportedly offered a commitment not to advertise on sites offering content without permission.

In common with many other anti-piracy groups, BREIN is now sending plenty of takedown requests to both sites and search engines. A total of 2.3 million URL takedown notices were sent to Google last year, making an average of around 44,000 per week. According to Google’s Transparency Report, most related to file-host search engine FilesTube, followed by now-defunct torrent site isoHunt.

Conclusion

There can be little doubt that in recent years BREIN has proven to be a major thorn in the side of many hundreds of mostly small, Netherlands-based file-sharing sites. However, while it seems unlikely that BREIN would be outwardly untruthful in its annual statements, the anti-piracy outfit provides zero evidence in support of its claims. Pirate Bay aside, not a single site is mentioned by name, even though the claim is that more than 700 (sites and proxies) were taken down in 2013.

Effective? The rightsholders paying them must think so.

_{Photo: Dan Zen}

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Court ruled against local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, concluding that the blockade was ineffective and restricted the ISPs’ entrepreneurial freedoms.

Responding to the verdict the two ISPs quickly unblocked the site, but with separate cases still pending The Pirate Bay remained inaccessible to users of various other Dutch ISPs.

In a surprise announcements today, this situation changed. UPC Netherlands, the second largest ISP in the country, said it has decided to lift the Pirate Bay blockade.

This is a significant move since the court has yet to decide on the appeal in UPC’s case, a decision which isn’t expected before April this year.

In a message on its website UPC says that it discussed the issue with anti-piracy group BREIN and reached an agreement to discontinue the blockade, at least for now.

“BREIN and UPC therefore agreed to lift The Pirate Bay blockade,” the statement reads.

BREIN has yet to decide whether to appeal the case against Ziggo and XS4ALL. If it does so successfully, the blockade may be reinstated again, but this could take years.

KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort are the remaining ISPs who still block The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands. It is unknown whether they plan to lift the ban in the near future.

Update: KPN also unblocked The Pirate Bay after it reached an agreement with BREIN.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In 2010 Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN went to court to try and force Ziggo, the Netherlands’ largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay.

Ziggo were later joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL, fighting the action together in the hope of avoiding a damaging precedent.

Initially the court decided that blocking all subscribers went too far but BREIN wasn’t satisfied and took the case to a full trial, which they won. Both Ziggo and XS4ALL filed subsequent appeals, arguing that the blockade was ineffective and denied subscribers’ free access to information.

Today the Court of The Hague released its verdict which sides with the Internet providers.

In its ruling the Court states that the Pirate Bay blockade is disproportionate and ineffective, citing TNO research and the Baywatch report of the University of Amsterdam. As a result, the blockade was found to hinder the Internet providers’ entrepreneurial freedoms.

The court based its decision on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which both includes “freedom to conduct a business” and “right to property.” In this case the entrepreneurial freedom outweighs property rights, because the blockades are disproportionate and ineffective.

Based on the above, the appeal court overturned the blocking order and ordered the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group to pay 326,000 euros ($445,000) in legal fees.

Commenting on the ruling, XS4ALL says that the verdict allows them to keep the Internet free from censorship. The ISP will disable the blockade effective immediately.

“We are very pleased the court’s verdict. This guarantees freedom of access to information. That is good for Dutch citizens, good for the Internet and good for ISPs who can continue to fulfill their important role neutrally,” the company states.

Ziggo is also happy with the outcome of the case and says the court found the right balance. “We’re not a police officer,” spokesman Erik van Doeselaar told Tweakers.

BREIN is disappointed in the court’s decision but noted that it agreed with the anti-piracy group on several issues. The anti-piracy group notes, however, that the court agreed that traffic to The Pirate Bay had reduced, even though BitTorrent usage in The Netherlands didn’t.

“The court’s ruling is detrimental to the development of the legal online market which requires protection against illegal competition,” BREIN director Tim Kuik says in a response.

“The purpose of blocking The Pirate Bay is obviously to reduce copyright infringement via The Pirate Bay. It is paradoxical that although the court finds that this goal is indeed achieved, it rejects the blockade because users are going to other sites,” Kuik adds.

Besides Ziggo and XS4ALL, several other Internet providers were ordered to block The Pirate Bay based on the original ruling. The appeals of these ISPs are still pending, and will be decided on later this year.

Needless to say the verdict is a major win for the Internet providers. Unlike their counterparts in the UK and elsewhere they decided to appeal the case to the bitter end – and won.

Update: added response from BREIN as well as some context.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While many people get annoyed when regular file-sharing sites are targeted with legal action, an extra-special level of annoyance is achieved when Hollywood and its proxies decide to shut down sites that offer fan-created subtitles.

Nevertheless, the outrage doesn’t dissuade the studios. After dropping out of the headlines for some months, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is now back with a campaign against sites offering subtitles. One of the domains targeted is Bierdopje.com, a TV show news site ranked 400th most-popular domain in the Netherlands.

In an announcement yesterday, site operator ‘Sypher’ explained how BREIN had contacted him with threats over the free subtitling services offered by the site’s translators. The anti-piracy group’s lawyers explained that Bierdopje must immediately cease and desist from engaging in “unlawful and illegal” acts or face a lawsuit.

In addition, BREIN also demanded an undisclosed cash payment within a week to cover the costs it had incurred so far, a demand that Sypher describes as “extortion.”

“You guessed it, we simply cannot go up against the legal ravings of this party with delusions of grandeur and overpaid lawyers, and certainly not within the short deadlines they set us,” Sypher says. “We simply don’t have the financial resources to embroil us in such a process.”

Importantly, Bierdopje is not a file-sharing portal offering movies or TV shows and before this contact from BREIN the site had never received a single takedown request from a rightsholder.

“We do no harm and we don’t harm the income of producers. We help people who do not speak the English language, plus the hearing impaired or deaf,” Sypher explains.

“Anyway, many of the series translated by our users do not even come out in the Netherlands,” he adds.

With no sensible or effective way of opposing BREIN, Sypher says that Bierdopje will now remove all references and links to subtitles in addition to suspending the translation and subtitling team and shutting down their IRC channel.

“We very much regret that a private party such as BREIN has grabbed a hobby project like ours around the neck. Furthermore, we understand that this will come as a blow to our users and translators and will create frustration but there is unfortunately nothing we can do,” Sypher concludes.

According to Dutch news site Tweakers, BREIN has sent a similar warning to other sites including SimplyReleases.com, which appears to have shut down its operations.

In July, Swedish police raided the popular subtitling site Undertexter.se, an action that outraged the so-called ‘subbing’ community. Despite the aggression, that site was soon back online and is currently operating business as usual.

Just recently the music industry in the United States also decided to renew its offensive against sites offering text related to entertainment products. During a press event November 11, the National Music Publishers’ Association announced that it had sent cease and desist notices to around 50 sites that offer song lyrics without permission.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Ziggo were later joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL, fighting the action together in the hope of avoiding a damaging precedent. Initially the court decided that blocking all subscribers went too far but BREIN wasn’t satisfied and took the case to a full trial.

In late 2011 the case was heard, with the ISPs arguing in favor of their customers’ right to have free access to information and BREIN countering that copyrights need protecting too.
In January 2012 the ISPs lost the case and BREIN celebrated victory.

Both Ziggo and XS4ALL subsequently filed appeals but in May 2012 yet more local ISPs – KPN/Telfort, UPC,T-Mobile and Tele2 – were ordered to block The Pirate Bay on the back of the original ruling.

Ziggo and XS4ALL appeal

Today the Ziggo / XS4ALL appeal is being heard in the Court of The Hague. Andreas Udo de Haes, editor of Dutch news site Webwereld, has been live tweeting from the courtroom and there are some interesting arguments to report.

The legal team for XS4ALL began with a reference to the failed SOPA/PIPA legislation in the United States which would have allowed DNS and IP blocking of ‘pirate sites’. Over in Europe, the EU Enforcement Directive is clear on ISP liability for third-party infringements and proactive blocking of communications is prohibited according to recent case-law (1)(2), the ISP’s lawyer argued.

XS4ALL went on to insist that blocking the full Pirate Bay site is a disproportionate response – even if 90% of the indexed content is illegal, many hundreds of thousands of legitimate files are now affected by the blockade.

In any event, the ISP believes that website blocking is ineffective in stamping out copyright infringement. Research carried out by ISPs and researchers has found that blocking The Pirate Bay is futile. If the tool is useless, then there can’t possibly be a need for it, the ISP told the court.

A combination of improved legal options and educational measures are a better bet, XS4ALL concluded.

Ziggo: File-sharing is an advertising channel

Next up was the lawyer for Ziggo, who began by pointing out that not only is the blockade of The Pirate Bay easily circumvented using proxy sites, but there are also plenty of alternative sites offering similar content.

Ziggo said that file-sharing had not caused the end of the music industry and that offering decent legal alternatives leads to a decline in piracy. The existence of iTunes shows that it is entirely possible to compete with ‘free’, the ISP said.

Ziggo’s lawyer said that while BREIN insists that the growth of file-sharing has damaging effects on culture, creativity and the entertainment industry, research shows that the sector is actually growing. The ISP said if there is indeed a relationship between piracy and legal services, it is a positive one, with piracy operating as an advertising channel.

Ziggo went on to underline that it has absolutely no connection to The Pirate Bay and operates only as an intermediary, yet it is expected to implement a very broad filter which indiscriminately blocks users regardless of the kind of content they’re trying to access.

The ISP added that the EU court previously held that preventive measures are only allowed if the fundamental rights at stake in the case are carefully weighed. The current blockade is the start of a very dangerous path, Ziggo concluded.

BREIN: Pirate Bay is run by teenagers profiting from ads of naked girls

After a short break, BREIN presented their case. The anti-piracy group said that despite the ISPs proclaiming the end of the Internet if they are forced to block sites like TPB, no such thing has come about. ISPs are able to block spam because their customers prefer it, but blocking a site such as The Pirate Bay is suddenly difficult only because their customers find it useful.

ISPs are in the business of selling bandwidth, BREIN’s lawyer said, but this is at the expense of poor artists and bankrupt record stores.

BREIN said that the nature of BitTorrent is clear – its users upload as well as download so are therefore infringing copyright. The Pirate Bay also infringes and represents the greatest instance of piracy “in the history of mankind” and must be stopped. Just this week it had Grand Theft Auto V in advance of its official launch.

BREIN’s lawyer said that 95% of the content indexed by The Pirate Bay is illegal and the legal content has “zero seeders and zero peers.” The site removes fakes, does not respond to takedown notices, and is run by “a pair of Swedish teenagers who turn 30 million euros in revenue with ads of naked girls.”

Countering claims that the blockade is ineffective, BREIN said that its research shows that when confronted with a block, users tend to go to other sites, an indication that the blockade is indeed working. Those other sites, BREIN said, will be targeted in due course.

Blocking is a proportional response and costs very little to implement, BREIN went on to argue, adding that according to Alexa, Google and Comscore, The Pirate Bay’s traffic dropped when the blockades were introduced and fell again when its proxy sites were hit. Surprisingly, BREIN told the court it had shut down around 200 proxies.

BREIN went on to argue that the blockades had been effective in reducing piracy and stated that previous studies reporting no decrease in torrent traffic after the blockades were introduced could not be relied upon. There had been an increase in legal BitTorrent usage, BREIN said, such as server syncing carried out by Facebook, traffic which the studies did not look at.

The anti-piracy group also contested the notion that DNS blockades are a form of abuse. BREIN said the technique was more akin to a configuration change rather than an attack on the Internet. As for the EU ruling in the SABAM case, BREIN said it had concentrated on the L’Oreal v eBay judgment. It was not asking for hugely expensive packet level filtering but a straightforward block of The Pirate Bay, in same way that the ISPs block thousands of spam sites every day.

Interestingly the judge then questioned BREIN on the effectiveness of the blockades. BREIN said its goal is to have The Pirate Bay blocked, however the judge recalled that BREIN had already admitted that people circumvent that ban by going to other sites. BREIN said they would tackle those sites next but Ziggo countered by stating that many of those sites are outside the Netherlands.

And now comes the wait, possibly as long as six weeks, for what could turn out to be an extremely important ruling.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When NZBmatrix shut down over piracy concerns in December, hundreds of thousands of Usenet junkies were looking for an alternative indexer.

A large number eventually ended up at Usenet-Crawler.com, which offered a decent alternative.

Unfortunately for them, the fun didn’t last. Protecting the rights of various entertainment industry companies, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN contacted the site’s hosting company, asking it to pull the site offline.

In an email the group explains that the site “is offering a choice of popular titles in the area of films, and music that are made available without the required prior permission of the rights owners.”

Since the site owner hasn’t responded, BREIN wants the host to shut it down instead. This request was successful as Usenet-Crawler is no longer working.

This practice is not uncommon for BREIN, who have shuttered thousands of (mostly smaller) file-sharing sites through similar threats over the years.

Below is the email Usenet-Crawler’s host received, which is currently published on the site’s home-page.

—

Dear Sir, Madam,

Pieter Haringsma
Legal Affairs
Stichting BREIN

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Thus far the blockades haven’t been very effective. Instead, they caused a traffic shift from the main Pirate Bay site to the many proxies or other torrent sites out there.

In an attempt to turn things around, local anti-piracy group BREIN has been going after Dutch proxy-site owners. While their efforts were successful against many sites, including one run by the local Pirate Party, not every approach has run smoothly.

Tristan, the owner of several proxies including Kuiken.co, refused to give in despite two preliminary injunctions and a pending court case.

Turning up the pressure, BREIN has now seized the bank account of the proxy site operator, which he discovered yesterday when checking his balance. Because Tristan wasn’t informed about the seizure he decided to contact his bank, who replied with the following message:

“A bailiff has seized your bank account. As a result the funds in your bank account are currently unavailable, until we receive instructions from the bailiff on how to proceed.”

After requesting more information the bank informed Tristan that his funds had been seized on behalf of BREIN.

The anti-piracy group confirmed the seizure today and told Tweakers that it relates to penalties connected to the preliminary injunctions handed down earlier. Since Tristan kept the site online and refused to pay the penalties, BREIN has now come to collect.

But that’s not the end of the matter.

Later this month BREIN and Tristan will go to trial. BREIN wants the proxy operator to shut down his site Kuiken.co. In addition, they want the court to prevent him from linking to other proxies or encouraging the public to access The Pirate Bay in any other way.

In February, Tristan started a crowdfunding campaign to pay for his legal costs, and he has since raised more than 7,500 euros. The campaign ends in four days and it’s unsure whether any of the defense fund money has been caught up in the seizure.

TorrentFreak asked both BREIN and Tristan for a comment on the recent developments but we have yet to receive a response.

Update: BREIN has posted a statement on its website explaining that in addition to the Dutch bank account Tristan’s Paypal assets have also been seized.

Update: Tristan explains that the Paypal issue means that he doesn’t have acces to his legal funds. He believes BREIN is actively obstructing his legal defense.

“The fact that they want to get their hands on the money for my defense makes clear that they don’t want me to defend myself. For the very same reason they probably didn’t send me the amended complaint about the court case which starts at June 5,” Tristan told TorrentFreak.

“This latest move and the fact that they chose for ex parte procedures in the past makes quite clear they don’t want the judge to hear me. You might call it obstruction,” he adds.

“Unfortunately my Indiegogo campaign doesn’t function at this moment, because of the problems with my PayPal account. People can send donations directly to my lawyer. (Account name: Wisemen B.V. IBAN: NL78 ABNA 0422 3081 53 Subject: Verdediging Tristan Pol.)”

Update: Apparently Tristan can still withdraw funds from his Paypal account.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.