Two Dutch ISPs ordered to 'go SOPA' and block Pirate Bay
Ziggo and XS4ALL, Dutch ISPs, have been ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay or face fines of 10,000 euros per day.
A suit brought by the anti-piracy BRIEN group back in 2010 has finally finished, and the Court of the Hague ruled that since 30 percent of Ziggo users, and 4.5 percent of XS4ALL users, use The Pirate Bay to violate copyright agreements, access must be stopped. Under Dutch law, only uploading unauthorized files is illegal, so the bi-directional nature of BitTorrent falls under Dutch jurisdiction. This follows a court order by the Dutch on The Pirate Bay to block Dutch users, which, not surprisingly, TPB ignored.
Legal appeals are planned, and both ISPs say that directly blocking a foreign website won't work anyway. BRIEN (Besherming Rechten Enterainment Industrie Nederland) also plans to file lawsuits against other ISPs in the Netherlands. The group shut down ShareConnector.com back in December 2004.
Goodbye, open Internet
Freedom died a little today :(
Swislii on torrentfreak.com
I dont want to live on this planet any more
dmw017 on theverge.com
The ISP XS4ALL will appeal. The Director of XS4ALL, Theo de Vries, called it censorship, and does not want to comply. De Vries called the verdict "a black day for free Internet" and "a bow to the entertainment industry".
Grasnek on techdirt.com
Hatred
This will not stop. We have to kill all these corporate parasites starting with the bankers and the entertainment industry. Let's kill them all! Bring the guillotines!
Guest on torrentfreak.com
And you can't really blame the Judge as he is just bowing to the pressure the US is applying all over the globe at the behest of their corporate sponsors. And we wonder why people hate us.
That Anonymous Coward on techdirt.com
Is Tim Kuik dead yet? He'd do the world a favor if he jumped from the highest floor of BREIN building.
Ninja on torrentfreak.com
Won't matter
Playing wack-a-mole with sites isn't going to stop them for longer than it takes to update a DNS or hosts entry.
el_segfaulto on techdirt.com
I believe that this will not end well for BREIN or any of these other commercial (vampiric) organisations, and their over-zealousness will eventually be recognised by the courts.
HollywoodAnna on torrentfreak.com
The problem is bigger than just the blocking of TPB. 1. The ruling was based on false data (small research, big extrapolation and a stupid circular argument of the judge) and 2. BREIN can block new domains and IP’s of TPB.
MagicNL on theverge.com
Will American court cases now have a precedent to follow, or an example of how futile such laws are against piracy?