In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the tracker’s founders to court this summer. BREIN won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter 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 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.
