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Fri, 23 Oct 2009 Dutch court orders Pirate Bay to remove Torrent links

Acting at the request of Dutch anti-piracy group Stichting BREIN

Nick Spence

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The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent search engine, has been told by a court in Amsterdam to remove all links to copyrighted material and close access to Dutch users within three months or face a fine up to €3m/£2.75m.

The Amsterdam referral court ordered the three Pirate Bay founders to remove the links acting at the request of Dutch anti-piracy group Stichting BREIN.

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The Pirate Bay doesn't actually contain any files only links to BitTorrent files. The Pirate Bay is billed as the worlds largest BitTorrent tracker, and reportedly has more 22 million users worldwide.

However, the founders of the site claim they no longer have any control over content and can't comply with the order, having sold it in 2006 to Riservella Ltd., a company registered in the Seychelles.

"It's a bizarre story," said their lawyer, Ernst-Jan Louwers. "The court assumes that they're behind the site - end of discussion."

The Pirate Bay founders - Frederik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholmmen - along with a fourth defendant were found guilty in April this year by a Swedish court of having promoted copyright infringement.

The court ordered them to pay around 30 million Swedish kronor (£2.4 million) in damages, although all four defendants appealed the verdicts.

Earlier this week it was announced that appeal won't be heard until next year, having originally been announced for November.

The delay is due to allegations of bias directed at two of the judges, Ulrika Ihrfelt and Katarina Boutz , which must be resolved before the appeal can take place.

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Comments received


Anthony said on Fri, 23 Oct 2009

Since when did Holland have juristiction in Swedn anyway?

Arnoud Engelfriet said on Fri, 23 Oct 2009

To all

The Court of Amsterdam has received a letter from Reservella, the owner of the website ThePiratebay.org according to the founders.

In it Reservella makes clear that Reservella does not own the site. This contradicts statements made by Piratebay founder Peter Sunde. The result was that the judge in Amsterdam did not believe the founders of The Pirate Bay anymore and now they have lost this particular battle.

I am an IT lawyer and involved in cases such as BREIN vs FTD. I call on all file sharers to resist to those forces that are trying to impose restrictions on file sharing services.

However, I also want to urge everybody to play this game fairly, otherwise the damage to our community will be even worse.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,

A. Engelfriet
The Netherlands

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