Last summer, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde to court. The mission – neutralize The Pirate Bay’s activities in The Netherlands.

BREIN won the case and the founders were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they chose to appeal. The trio denied current connections to the site but the Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold to Seychelles-based company Reservella.

Last month the earlier ruling was confirmed in a full trial at the Amsterdam Court, a hearing none of the founders attended.

The Court ruled that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter will now have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day for non-compliance. However no action has yet been taken by the site to block Dutch users.

Perhaps concerned that the founders aren’t aware of the Dutch ruling, today BREIN boss Tim Kuik embarked on a remarkable mission.

As we reported earlier, the Green Party hosted a panel discussion titled “Art in the Digital Age” in Vienna, Austria, this week. One of the invited panel guests was Werner Müller, boss of the Austrian film and music industry trade association. Müller withdrew his participation after he discovered that Peter Sunde was going to be there.

Tim Kuik, however, saw pinning down Sunde’s location as a golden opportunity.

“Just explained new Dutch verdict to Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde in Vienna and handed him a copy of it: stop or pay 50K a day,” said Kuik tonight.

In order to document the event, Kuik also had their meeting filmed and recorded.

In a statement BREIN said that Sunde “was spotted on a terrace near the open air debate venue”. There he was approached by Kuik who explained the Amsterdam Court’s ruling and gave him a copy.

“He is aware of the verdict now”, says Kuik, “so the terms are running, he has to show up or pay up.”

Article from: TorrentFreak.

In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the tracker’s founders to court last summer.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of the options for the government is to criminalize unauthorized downloading by making it punishable by law. The entertainment industry, represented by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN among others, have lobbied extensively for such a change. Consumers, on the other hand, prefer to keep things the way they are right now.

Backing interests of the general public, Dutch consumer rights organization Consumentenbond has started a campaign where they defend the public’s right to download copyrighted material without repercussions.

“Sometimes I buy, sometimes I download, but I am not a criminal..,” is the message the consumer organization is trying to put across in the newly launched campaign.

The rationale behind the campaign is that the the entertainment industry has failed to provide sufficient legal alternatives to online piracy, leaving consumers no other choice than to consume online media through file-sharing sites.

“At the moment, paid downloads don’t offer any added value compared to unauthorized downloads,” Bart Combée, Director of the Consumer Rights Organization said . “Before criminalizing consumers, the industry has to make sure that they offer a decent amount of content. Once that improves, I think consumers are willing to pay,” he added.

Previously, the consumer rights organization also stood up for users of The Pirate Bay, after the Amsterdam court ruled that the site should block Dutch users without reviewing the evidence carefully.

The present campaign reiterates what many others have said before. There has to be a fair balance between the interests of multi-billion dollar companies and the individual rights of consumers. And since a report commissioned by the Dutch government recently concluded that file-sharing actually has a positive effect on the economy, it might be best to keep things the way they are for now.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.