Court Says Dutch Anti-Piracy Organization Overreached; Won't Shut Down Pirate Party Proxy Site

from the good-news dept

We just wrote about the bizarre process in the Netherlands, where the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN was able to get a court injunction to order the Dutch Pirate Party to stop hosting a proxy service that redirected people to The Pirate Bay, and then tried to get the Party in trouble for merely pointing people to links of other proxies that could take them to The Pirate Bay. All of this went way beyond the initial order barring access to The Pirate Bay and (more importantly) was done without letting the Dutch Pirate Party have its side heard by the court. There was an interesting discussion in our comments, in which one individual insisted that completely changing the nature of the original injunction was no big deal, and there was simply no reason for the Pirate Party to be heard from, since there was no adversarial issue to adjudicate. That, of course, is ridiculous -- because a political party was being censored, way outside the bounds of the original injunction.

Thankfully, a court in The Hague seems to be realizing that BREIN keeps changing the rules after the fact. It has said that BREIN can't demand that the Dutch Pirate Party take down a general proxy -- as opposed to the specific reverse proxy that only went to TPB. The more general proxy has to be allowed. Next week, the court will explore more fully if the specific proxy really should have been taken down as well. It's good to see the court recognizing that just because BREIN wants to (impossibly) block all access to TPB, it doesn't get to play whac-a-mole by continually changing what the ruling actually said.

Filed Under: brein, dutch pirate party, the hague, the pirate bay