A Dutch court has ruled against Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay, ordering that it immediately begin preventing Dutch users from accessing copyrighted material on the site, and giving it 3 months to remove a list of torrents or face of fine of 5000 euros ($7512 USD) p/person p/day.

The judgment was the result of an appeal of an earlier ruling in which the site’s founders were ordered to block Dutch users entirely or face a fine of 30,000 euros ($42,906 USD) p/day. In that case, because it couldn’t physically find and serve them with a summons, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN took the unusual step of of notifying the Pirate Bay’s founders via Facebook and Twitter. They were found guilty in absentia and vowed to appeal.

“None of us have access to even block everything, so good luck with that,” co-founder Peter Sunde twittered at the time. “I wrote a letter to the court telling them that.”

The court also ordered that the three co-founders cover BREIN’s court costs.

It’s not yet clear if the three will appeal the case.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

[Via TF]

Late last week a Dutch court ordered the Pirate Bay’s founders to begin blocking access by Dutch citizens or face a fine of 30,000 euros ($42,906 USD) p/day if it fails to comply after 10 days.

The deadline began this past Saturday.

The case was a result of legal action brought by Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN which has long waged a battle against BitTorrent tracker sites in that country. It is the reason why Demonoid had to close up shop and move across the pond to Canada back in 2007.

The court ordered them “each separately and together, to stop and keep stopped the infringements on copyright and related rights of Stichting Brein in the Netherlands.”

Co-founder Peter Sunde noted that the order doesn’t have much success of ever happening being that they claim to have relinquished control over the site way back in 2006.

“None of us have access to even block everything, so good luck with that,” he twittered. “I wrote a letter to the court telling them that.”

BREIN apparently decided not to wait for the outcome of the Pirate Bay’s appeal of a previous conviction for copyright infringement in a Swedish court back in April, nor the emergence of a new, legal incarnation of the BitTorrent tracker site with the help of Global Gaming Factory expected to take place later this month.

Because it couldn’t find the site’s founders, BREIN took the unorthodox step of notifying the Pirate Bay’s founders via Facebook and Twitter. They said they were still unaware of the trial and so did not attend, but they’ve announced their intention to appeal the verdict.

The ruling is especially foolish because it suggests that regional blocking of a website will be effective in reducing piracy. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of ways to circumvent any efforts to block the Pirate Bay, not the least of which are VPN services like the recently advertised ItsHidden which is free to use.

Stay tuned.

Dutch-based BitTorrent tracker site Mininova has announced that it’s running a content recognition trial as part of its overall efforts to "improve" its platform.

"Today, we decided to extend our platform and run a trial with content recognition," says a blog post from today. "This basically means that likely infringing video files referred to by torrents are checked by a third party content recognition system. If the system finds that the file corresponds to unauthorized content, we remove and block the torrent that refers to this file on Mininova."

The BitTorrent tracker site wants to help copyright holders.

"We hope that this system will make it easier for copyright owners to remove torrents that refer to infringing content from Mininova, while still offering the best platform to our users," it adds.

Mininova is no doubt trying to better position itself when it faces the similarly Dutch-based anti-piracy organization BREIN later this month.

Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer said believes the upcoming case is not meant to determine the legality of BitTorrent tracker sites, but rather to determine what sort of filters they should be forced to use.

“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content," Dubbelboer said previously. "In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not."

This content recognition system trial is surely part of that effort.

jared@zeropaid.com

The eDonkey 2000 community suffered another casualty on their network last week. It seems that the Dutch Anti-piracy organization BREIN has shut down “the last of the Razorback servers” This is according to a press release (Google translated) the organization issued last week.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the eDonkey2000 network has been shut down – far from it. Users can still easily connect to the network through other servers featured on trusted white-lists like Peerates. Failing this, there is always source exchange and the Kademlia network that will help many eMule users connect to each other.

From the BREIN press release:

The last of the so-called Razorback servers this week at the request of BREIN offline by its Dutch hosting provider. Other Dutch hosting providers had earlier Razorback 3.0, Razorback 3.2 and 3.3 completed Razorback. Now is also the canvas for Razorback 3.1 cases. The Razorback servers were important links to support the p2p-uitwisselnetwerk eDonkey. Razorback 3.1 was the largest of its kind and offered more than 350,000 users access to the eDonkey network. The vast majority of the available files on the servers was without permission of the copyright holders.

The server went offline after the hosting provider reporting of the Foundation BREIN submitted to its customer, but a reply. In those early reports BREIN to make inaccessible because of the servers that are structurally access to illegal content.

Many illegal eDonkey servers are anonymous to the Netherlands came after foreign hosting providers have notice them on hold. BREIN works out to these servers from Netherlands chain. In the Netherlands are hosting providers Euroaccess and Ecatel the last remaining service providers engaged in illegal eDonkey servers on their network products. BREIN will not hesitate to take legal action to close these servers.

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