Dutch Judge's Anti-Piracy Activities Draw Accusations Of Corruption In Pirate Bay Censorship
from the conflicts-of-interest dept
We were a bit surprised last week to hear that a court in the Netherlands had ruled that the Dutch Pirate Party had to censor itself, when it came to explaining to people how to use proxies to get around The Pirate Bay block. At some point such censorship needs to be seen as a fundamental violation of human rights. If you are going to block a website, that's one thing. But blocking a political party from demonstrating the ridiculousness of such a block by ordering them not to talk about it? You're just asking for trouble.However, we should have remembered that we've seen this kind of thing in the past in the Netherlands. A couple years ago, a court blocked the usenet community site FTD. FTD did not host any infringing content. It did not offer torrents of any infringing content. It was simply a community offering that some people used to post information on where you could find infringement. And for that, it was blocked. And yet... some people noticed at the time that the judge in that case taught "anti-piracy" classes, where the person running the events was the lawyer representing the entertainment industry in that same case.
Guess what? Turns out the judge in this case was that exact same judge, leading Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge to accuse him of beiing "not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt." Don't they have conflict of interest rules in the Netherlands?
Filed Under: censorship, corruption, ftd, netherlands, pirate party, rick falkvinge
