In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, BREIN took three of the tracker’s founders to court. The anti-piracy outfit won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.
Today the Amsterdam Court announced that the earlier default judgment has been nullified. That is, the three operators don’t have to block access to all Dutch users.
It was concluded that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court the site does assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.
The defense had argued that not Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter 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.
The Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works. The list is to be provided by BREIN, and is similar to the earlier ruling against Mininova. The defendants are given three months to comply, if not, they will face penalties of 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day.
In addition to removing the torrents the defendants have to block Dutch users from accessing certain parts of the site (across all their domains) where users can download copyrighted files. Finally, the three have to cover the costs BREIN made for the court case.
Ernst-Jan Louwers, the lawyer for the three Pirate Bay defendants told TorrentFreak that his clients are currently considering whether or not to appeal this judgment.
More info will be added as it comes in… (Court ruling in Dutch)
