Dutch Anti-Piracy Group May Face Legal Charges For Stealing Servers
from the if-you-haven't-paid-for-it,-it's-stealing dept
We've noted in the past how the very aggressive Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN seems to have a problem with stealing computers. The group, which is a private, industry-backed group, seems to fancy itself as some sort of law enforcement adjunct, despite the fact it has no actual legal authority. This has created problems in the past, when the courts have questioned why the police seemed to rely solely on BREIN's questionably collected evidence, rather than doing their own investigation. And some lawsuits have even been dismissed for relying too much on BREIN's highly questionable evidence.So, by now, you would think that BREIN would be a bit more careful these days not to pretend it has more legal powers than it does. However, the group only seems to go further and further. Last week, it came out that BREIN was able to "seize" a group of servers from a small South
It seems this entire lack of any sort of due process and private industry groups stealing servers and domains with little basis is a growing trend. It sounds like Alejandra Transporte is considering taking further legal action against both BREIN and WorldStream. I'm curious if the usual defenders of seizures think that this particular seizure was warranted?
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Filed Under: netherlands, seizures, servers
Companies: brein
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/sarcasm
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You've been watching too many movies.
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Uhm, Mike? I think you meant South AMERICAN.
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Oops. Fixed.
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You realize of course how stupid your comment sounds now, right?
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Not a literal robber, gun, person or wallet.
Robber: BREIN
Gun: Legal action
Person: ISP
Wallet: Servers
Fits pretty nicely, although would have been better if it was a fake gun (no actual legality to the threat/actions).
You intentionally don't accept of course how stupid your comment sounds now, right?
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Ya gotta realize--50% of the people you meet are of below average intellect.
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""seized" is such a wonderful term. If the ISP willingly handed them over, who's fault is it?"
The ISP did not hand them over, the data center did.
Basically equivalent to me walking off the street to your bank and demanding the contents of your safety deposit box and bank handing them over
Could see two cases here, something akin to criminal theft by deception against BREIN and a civil suit against the data center
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I think Mike is once again using hyperbole and charged words to make this look like something it just isn't. If anyone did something wrong, it's the datacenter who handed out other people's equipment without reason.
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Brein knowingly took other people's property.
Plus it violate the privacy of the ISP's customers.
Both things are illegal in the Netherlands.
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I want your car so I create a official looking valet ticket and claim it.
The valet gets the car and I get in and drive away.
Who's fault is it?
Sure the valet is at fault for being duped and so you go after them to get your money back. If the valet ticket is a good forgery then you probably can't get them for negligence, but you may get a settlement out of it.
But the mastermind is still Me. I knowingly and actively committed a theft by taking a physical good that didn't belong to me. I can get (in the US) sued for civil and arrested for criminal issues(if the Police decide to).
Am I off the hook if I claim that you were transporting something illegal in the car so I took it to investigate? If you are not the police I don't think that would fly.
If I just took pictures of the car and returned it could i say I just borrowed it? Or would I get sued for copy write infringement? (ok a bit of snarkyness there)
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Um. But that's not what happened. What happened here was Worldstream gave away *someone else's servers* believing that BREIN had official authority to demand them.
Bumming a cig off someone is totally different.
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How about if I came up to you in a security guard uniform as you left a shop and convinced you to hand over your friend's shopping "because they are under investigation for shoplifting"? You and your friend would have pretty good grounds to have me arrested when you found out I had no authority to act for the shop. But perhaps not since you gave me his shopping willingly, right?
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Only if I didn't own the cigarette in the first place.
What happened here was:
BREIN asked the datacenter for a cigarette, and the datacenter grabbed the cigarette the ISP had bought and was smoking and gave it to BREIN.
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> a request without a warrant.
And more to the point, as a private non-law enforcement, non-government organization, they're not entitled to any warrant. Ever. For any reason.
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With all the fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, etc- party liability in copyright infringement litigation, it's not hand to see how they were forced to hand over the servers "voluntarily".
It's not beneath a group like BREIN to sue a datacentre, that stored servers owned by a different company, that hosted the content of another company, that was uploaded by random internet users.
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Further, you have to wonder: Why is a dutch anti-piracy group doing some sort of covert operations in South (whatever)? Are warez and copyright infringers so scared that they are down to trying to hide their servers in friendly countries to avoid legal action? Is that not the actions of guilty minded people?
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Nope. It's the actions of unduly persecuted people.
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Clearly, they didn't.
"Did they get a lawyers letter and decide by themselves that handing over the servers would be their best way to avoid any legal involvement?"
Probably, but the servers weren't their property to give away.
"Why is a dutch anti-piracy group doing some sort of covert operations in South (whatever)?"
Because it's a foreign company operating in the Netherlands?
"Are warez and copyright infringers so scared that they are down to trying to hide their servers in friendly countries to avoid legal action? Is that not the actions of guilty minded people?"
I don't think that's what happened, but I wouldn't hold it against them if they were afraid of BREIN and its illegal kamikaze tactics.
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Which is what you always say when the behavior by Big Content is so egregious even you can't think of a way to reasonably defend it.
You just claim there's "something more here we're not being told". You never have any evidence of that, of course, just some vague and nebulous assertion that there's some unidentified bit of information that is not being provided.
Your schtick is so old in this regard, that *it's* likely the source of that mysterious odor you're smelling.
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No, I think that plenty of people here have spotted the problem and refuse to look at it: The datacenter did something wrong. Brein can ask all it wants for X or Y or Z to happen, but that doesn't make it happen. Their requests (because they aren't court ordered) are just requests. The datacenter made the mistake, and normally should be liable.
Of course, when it comes out that the servers are packed full of stolen content, you won't care - it isn't relevant, right?
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Considering how they were obtained, seems there might be a problem getting them admitted as evidence since the chain of custody doesn't seem to include law enforcement anywhere.
BREIN is in possession of those servers with no oversight.
Bye bye servers as evidence.
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> or Z to happen
As a general statement, that's false. Even merely asking for something to which one is not entitled can be illegal, if it's done with deception, disguise, impersonation or threat.
> Of course, when it comes out that the servers
> are packed full of stolen content, you won't
> care - it isn't relevant, right?
No, it's actually not relevant. What the servers do or do not contain is completely irrelevant to whether BREIN was entitled to take posession of them or the methods they used to do so.
It's the same principle which applies to the police and search warrants. It's no defense to an illegal, warrantless search to say, "But your honor, the house was packed with illegal stuff. We found the murder weapon and two keys of heroin." The judge would rightly respond that what the house contained was wholly irrelevant as to whether the search was legal in the first place.
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Willful possession of stolen property is often regarded a crime, isn't it?
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Not if it isn't a crime in those countries. If an American goes to Amsterdam on vacation and smokes pot, they are not "guilty minded" because they're doing someting which is illegal back in Nebraska or wherever. They're doing something which is perfectly legal in the jurisdiction in which they are currently located.
Or a corporation decided to base its business in Delaware because the taxes aren't nearly as high as in California. Are they "guilty-minded" for choosing a legal climate that maximizes their business potential?
No. Nothing guilty about it.
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Like those guilty minded filmmakers who set up in Hollywood to escape Edison's patents.
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This involves a number of legal issues, such as breaking and contract and unlawful seizure. Just asking someone to give you something isn't legal, you need either a court order or a contract to do it legally, especially when it involves corporations.
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Theft
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This happened to me when someone tried to steal my vehicle last summer. They were unsuccessful thankfully but I seriously doubted I would have ever recovered anything to cover the damage so I chose not to file a report. that incident will not appear in any crime statistic anywhere because a far as anyone knows - it simply never happened.
If you follow the local political scene in any city that uses the online system you will find that "crime is way down" statistically. This pseudo "dropping" of the crime rate allows the local governments to justify cutting the funding for the regional law enforcement budget because obviously with the decrease in crime, fewer officers are needed!
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However the article links fine from the gadget.
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Seized
It all depends on how BREIN portrayed itself. If it represented itself as law enforcement and obtained the servers through pretenses of fraud and impresonation of an officer (these are US charges, I don't know if the host country has similiar charges).... then the fault is mostly BREIN's.
The other angle may have been nothing more than a mafia enforcer shakedown... give us your servers... or else... with unveiled legal battle threats left on the table.
Still, the ISP should have investigated the matter thoroughly before handing over sensitive user information and showed just a little more balls before betraying the users that pay them.
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Why no warrent?
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Re: Why no warrent?
There's your problem!
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Pay up or I will size your servers!
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Lawyers? I'd hire new ones.
BREIN is in the wrong for this vigilante act but at the same time it's also this ISP's fault for just complying.
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Re: Lawyers? I'd hire new ones.
"BREIN boss Tim Kuik admitted that his organization had somehow acquired the Swan servers from hosting provider WorldStream, who in turn weren�t in a position to simply give other people�s equipment to a third party."
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Also, there have been a few analysis in the Netherlands about the whole case and for some strange reason, Alejandra Transporte SA cannot be found on the Internet. Not as a web hosting company, anyways. Some people in the Netherlands thus think this is just some delay tactics by some hacker who knows that Brein now holds a lot of sensitive information about him, enough to be arrested and to receive a bill for an amount that cannot be pronounced, so big will it be! So, some delay tactics will allow him to clean up after himself, get a new identity, recover from plastic surgery and then to go deep in hiding...
Very, very deep...
It's also concluded that while it's not theft, it's inappropriate how Brein managed to get those servers. They will probably be fined for this but they end up being able to use any evidence found on those servers against it's owners. And that will hurt it's owners a lot!
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Personally I hope BREIN and Tim get a day in court just to remind them once and for all that they are nothing more than bought and paid for thugs.
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BREIN is not law enforcement, but it seems like they presented themselves as such and perpetrated a bit of real, actual, tangible theft.
Their domain should be seized as an instrument of criminal enterprise.
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> instrument of criminal enterprise.
Heh. Wouldn't *that* be funny.
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I assume you are talking about the domain seizures. You are comparing apples to oranges. This is a private group. The domain seizures are done by an arm of our government put in place by people that you voted for. If you don't like it, vote for someone else or run for office yourself.
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WorldStream = Datacenter
Alejandra Transporte = ISP
The datacenter handed over the servers not the ISP.
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They keep loosing cases because of stupid missteps of what they want the law to be rather than what it is.
And given the enormous funding and backing paying political leaders to give up peoples rights to keep corporations "protected" I am surprised that there are not more of these groups.
Because it is totally right to break the law to try and prove others might have broken the law. And we can prove they broke the law because we uploaded the criminal material ourselves!
Huh... I wonder if ICE is now just a division of BREIN.
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Good for BREIN, I say.
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Technically, the police had no business selling is, so the head of BREIN (Tim Kuijk) essentially stole the laptop from this hacker.
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