In an attempt to take The Pirate Bay offline in The Netherlands, last year anti-piracy group BREIN took three of the site’s founders to court.
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.
Update: Ziggo is refusing to co-operate with BREIN’s request.
“There is no legal basis for this request,” says a Ziggo announcement. “We are just a conduit. We provide people access to the Internet and have nothing to do with that website. Moreover, we favor public Internet.”
