Dutch Court Sides With Anti-Piracy Group; Says Pirate Bay Must Block Dutch Web Surfers
from the or-else-what? dept
We've seen more than enough stories already about questionable court rulings around the globe saying that certain ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay or other sites. Historically, such blocks have been a disaster. They don't work (people find an easy way around them) and the announcement of the ban itself almost always generates a lot more traffic to the banned site. It's like free advertising. However, the anti-piracy group BREIN appears to have taken a different strategy in the Netherlands. Rather than asking the court to have ISPs block The Pirate Bay, it asked the court to tell The Pirate Bay to block Dutch web surfers. BREIN, of course, has a history of overreaching, including demanding names of file sharers against local privacy laws and declaring that a usenet group, by itself was illegal.And yet again, a court has ruled in the entertainment industry's favor, going against basic civil rights. The court has said that The Pirate Bay must start blocking Dutch web surfers from reaching the site. Somehow, I doubt the folks at The Pirate Bay will comply. They've already complained about the process, noting that they were never summoned to the court to defend themselves, while the ruling itself actually spends a fair amount of time claiming that the folks from The Pirate Bay were fairly summoned through a variety of means. The court basically concludes that they should have known about the case, and their failure to show up will not stop the case from moving forward.
Not surprisingly, the Pirate Bay folks find the whole thing to be a farce. They're already suing BREIN's lawyers for falsely claiming that The Pirate Bay had launched a DDoS attack on BREIN's website. Also, amazingly, the court wouldn't even give them a copy of the ruling against them. Of course, as brokep notes, The Pirate Bay doesn't have any operations in the Netherlands anyway, so what can the court do?
In the meantime, is it worth mentioning that it was a Dutch study that recently said that file sharing had a positive impact on the economy?
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Filed Under: blocking, netherlands
Companies: brein, the pirate bay
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You said 'the economy'
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The suit is not against Pirate Bay but against the founders. If they do not comply, the founders will have to pay the fines.
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Geeeez
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How long until people come to their senses and begin the boycott? Hitting their pocketbooks is the only way they will ever see.
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That you have been sued
That you should have known you were being sued even though you weren't told
That you lost because you weren't told and didn't show up
That you were sued for the continuing operation of a web site that you no longer run
That the verdict was to block access from a country that has no legal jurisdiction over the website you don't own.
What would *your* response be?
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Looks Like a New...
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Even if this ruling is ignored, it builds up a case law against the Pirate Bay. Now it would be easier to get simmilar or more draconian rulings from other courts.
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Why, because they're both in the EU? Otherwise who cares? I asked this the last time, unless they are attempting to extradite, which they aren't, why would one supposedly sovereign's court system have ANY jurisdiction over a citizen of another sovereign nation?
Yay, we've unified Europe and America is still "fighting" communism. Wasn't their a guy back in the 30's that was trying to orchestrate the same thing?
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They cannot have it both ways.
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Just wanted to let you know that, while your story on the case and the verdict is perfectly accurate afaict, I do have a minor problem with the sentence "And yet again, a court has ruled in the entertainment industry's favor, going against basic civil rights."
The problem is that the court has had little choice in this matter. Dutch law states that if the defendant doesn't show up, a "verstek"-judgement has to be passed. As far as I know, this is similar to "default judgement" in the US, and generally means all the plaintiff's demands are assigned, as long as they are reasonable/constitutional.
This is the big problem in this case. Brein claims they have tried everything to notify TPB of the lawsuit they filed against them and claim TPB have been warned in time. TPB claims they did not know this early enough and therefore had no chance to show up/defend themselves in time.
The judge has seen the evidence provided by Brein (from what I've read, a large log of all the digital and real world methods Brein used to try and contact TPB) and has apparently decided that Brein was right. Wether the judge was right in this or not, I don't know, but that decision has little to do with choosing a side or with any of the demands made by Brein. Once the judge ruled that Brein was right and TPB had been warned and had just not shown up, he had little choice but to make a "verstek" vonnis, which led to the ruling we've all read about. So this ruling has little to do with siding with the entertainment industry, just with whether TPB knew about the court order in time.
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Sovereign nations ? In the EU ?
Henri
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