The group was responsible for the demise of the once largest torrent site Mininova, achieved a conviction against the Pirate Bay founders, and more recently expanded its track record with a victory against one of the largest Usenet communities on the Internet.

All the above was accomplished even though the actual downloading of copyrighted movies and music for personal use is completely legal in BREIN’s home country. In the Netherlands only the uploading part of file-sharing is punishable by law, but if new plans from the Government are adopted this may soon change.

Today, State Secretary of Security and Justice Fred Teeven announced that the Government wants to modernize current copyright law. One of the most drastic changes put forward in the new plans is that in addition to uploading, downloading of all copyrighted material will also be outlawed.

In addition to a complete ban on the sharing of copyrighted material, the new copyright plans will also get rid of the “copy-levy” on blank CDs and DVDs. This levy, ranging from $0.20 to $0.87 per piece, was put in place to compensate rights holders for the films and music that were copied for personal use.

The State Secretary notes that the changes related to file-sharing will not mean that the Government will actively prosecute individual downloaders, but stresses that they are needed to get “pirate websites” blocked by Internet service providers. At the moment this is impossible. Last year BREIN sued two of the largest Dutch ISPs, requesting that they should block their customers’ access to The Pirate Bay, but the attempt failed.

State Secretary Teeven emphasizes that The Pirate Bay is one of the main targets, although he misspells the website url in his official letter, pointing to piratebay.org instead. According to the State Secretary, The Pirate Bay is “a major resource of illegal material” which should be blocked by ISPs.

Although applicable to all citizens, the new law is specifically aimed at the blocking of illegal websites. There will be no three-strikes rules as proposed in other countries, and the Government will not chase individual file-sharers.

In a response to the news, BREIN confirmed that it will not go after individual file-sharers in the future either. Their prime targets are the websites that facilitate copyright infringement, not their users.

Aside from toughening the law, the new plans also include ‘protections’ for the privacy of file-sharers. One of the key points is that the rights holders can only claim the personal details of an alleged infringer if that person shared copyrighted material on a massive scale. This would prevent the pay-up-or-else settlement schemes that are currently ongoing in the United States.

Source: Dutch Government To Outlaw File-Sharing and Block The Pirate Bay

The group was responsible for the demise of the once largest torrent site Mininova, achieved a conviction against the Pirate Bay founders, and more recently expanded its track record with a victory against one of the largest Usenet communities on the Internet.

All the above was accomplished even though the actual downloading of copyrighted movies and music for personal use is completely legal in BREIN’s home country. In the Netherlands only the uploading part of file-sharing is punishable by law, but if new plans from the Government are adopted this may soon change.

Today, State Secretary of Security and Justice Fred Teeven announced that the Government wants to modernize current copyright law. One of the most drastic changes put forward in the new plans is that in addition to uploading, downloading of all copyrighted material will also be outlawed.

In addition to a complete ban on the sharing of copyrighted material, the new copyright plans will also get rid of the “copy-levy” on blank CDs and DVDs. This levy, ranging from $0.20 to $0.87 per piece, was put in place to compensate rights holders for the films and music that were copied for personal use.

The State Secretary notes that the changes related to file-sharing will not mean that the Government will actively prosecute individual downloaders, but stresses that they are needed to get “pirate websites” blocked by Internet service providers. At the moment this is impossible. Last year BREIN sued two of the largest Dutch ISPs, requesting that they should block their customers’ access to The Pirate Bay, but the attempt failed.

State Secretary Teeven emphasizes that The Pirate Bay is one of the main targets, although he misspells the website url in his official letter, pointing to piratebay.org instead. According to the State Secretary, The Pirate Bay is “a major resource of illegal material” which should be blocked by ISPs.

Although applicable to all citizens, the new law is specifically aimed at the blocking of illegal websites. There will be no three-strikes rules as proposed in other countries, and the Government will not chase individual file-sharers.

In a response to the news, BREIN confirmed that it will not go after individual file-sharers in the future either. Their prime targets are the websites that facilitate copyright infringement, not their users.

Aside from toughening the law, the new plans also include ‘protections’ for the privacy of file-sharers. One of the key points is that the rights holders can only claim the personal details of an alleged infringer if that person shared copyrighted material on a massive scale. This would prevent the pay-up-or-else settlement schemes that are currently ongoing in the United States.

Source: Dutch Government To Outlaw File-Sharing and Block The Pirate Bay

Today, however, we have a big apology to make. We’ve let you all down and we’ve let ourselves down too by completely missing one of the biggest developing stories the BitTorrent world has ever known. We’ve totally neglected to cover what can only be described as a wholesale slaughter of file-sharing venues in The Netherlands, and for this we wholeheartedly apologize.

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who have previously given Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Demonoid and What.cd a hard time in varying degrees, have been busy. And when we say busy, we aren’t messing around. During the last few months it’s up for debate whether the group’s staff have had time to sleep. If they’ve even stopped to eat it would be, frankly, somewhat of a surprise.

According to BREIN, which works mainly on behalf of the Hollywood studios but has branched out to work for other rights holders in recent times, during the first half of 2010 it shut down a staggering 422 “illegal websites”.

While the whole world was focused on the U.S. Government taking down less than 10 sites this year but making a huge song and dance about it, BREIN was quietly showing them how it’s really done.

In addition to 5 Usenet indexers, 6 streaming sites, a FTP server, and 29 sites linking to material on one-click hosters, this most prolific and apparently effective of anti-piracy groups took down 384 torrent sites in the last 6 months. That’s more than 2 torrent sites culled every day this year and we’ve failed to report on just about every one of them.

In an attempt to fill this gap, TorrentFreak contacted BREIN boss Tim Kuik for information but we didn’t do very well at all. We were told that they aren’t releasing the URLs of the sites since they only detail those that they take to court and naming them would only give them increased traction and popularity.

We also tried to find out their names through our own network but yet again we failed miserably. For this we apologize. A bloodbath going on under our noses, in our own community, we didn’t even notice and we still can’t give you details since it appears all the corpses have been buried in unmarked graves surrounded by a wall of silence.

The worst part is that this failing on our part is nothing new. All the signs were there a few months ago that BREIN was capable of carrying out yet another massacre in 2010, just as they did last year.

In 2009, BREIN said it shut down 35 eD2K servers, 38 streaming video sites and 14 Usenet portals/NZB sites. It also took responsibility for the destruction of an unprecedented 393 BitTorrent sites. We didn’t notice, but strangely neither did anyone else.

So what were we able to find out about the closures?

“The take down most often takes place through the hosting provider,” Kuik told TorrentFreak. “We also obtain identity details from the hosting providers but these sites tend to register under a false name. If the site changes to another hosting provider, we will contact that provider. In case all else fails we will go for blocking of the site by access providers. Currently there is court case pending about that.”

If BREIN is allowed to continue this rampage there won’t be any torrent sites left by 2012 and we’ll be left with literally nothing to report on. TorrentFreak will die, but really we only have ourselves to blame. Nearly 800 torrent sites gone already and not a whisper from us? A shameful performance. We’ll try to improve, for all our sakes.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

In the criminal case the operator of ShareConnector came out as the winner in 2007 and was released from all charges. However, after two years of waiting the Department of Justice decided to appeal the case. The site’s operator aDi was charged with membership of a criminal organization and assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material.

After having heard the case two months ago, the Court of The Hague has now decided to adjourn the case and reopen the proceedings. In quite an unusual move the Court has summoned public prosecutor R. Smits as a witness.

The Court wants the prosecutor to explain why the Department of Justice decided to go through with criminal proceedings in a case where a civil one would seem to be more suited. In The Netherlands copyright infringement related offenses fall under civil law unless they are very severe, which doesn’t seem to be the case here.

In addition, the Court weighs in that the evidence in this case has been collected by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN instead of the local authorities.

All these issues have been brought up several times by the defense lawyers, who have claimed numerous times that the Department of Justice has been ‘used’ by BREIN. In 2007 this led to the release of all charges against Shareconnector’s operator.

In this initial verdict the Court concluded that the authorities failed to provide any evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement nor enough to prove that it was criminal in nature. In addition, the judge ruled that the initial arrests were unlawful as the evidence provided by BREIN was insufficient.

This time around it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if the case again results in a victory for aDi.

“All in all this court decision could very well lead to the final judgment concluding the suspects unfit to plead because of the terribly unjust raids and lack of genuine investigation,” said aDi commenting on the Court’s actions.

“Is the world finally going to see the major mistakes the Department of Justice is covering up? Hopefully it won’t take another 6 years to get this simple truth outside.”

Article from: TorrentFreak.

In this case the “making available” wasn’t hosting or storing the movie, nor was it offering torrent or NZB links to it either. FTD allows users to report (or ‘spot’) the locations of files which exist on Usenet. It is the publication of this information which Eyeworks was seeking to stop, an activity it believes is tantamount to publishing the movie itself.

In early May the case was heard at a court in The Hague. FTD lost the case and the court issued an ‘ex parte injunction’ (one handed down without any FTD involvement) which banned the site from ‘spotting’ the Eyeworks movie.

Through its lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, FTD filed an objection on the basis that the provisional measure should not have been issued under Dutch law. That objection was heard and the decision was delivered yesterday – FTD lost again.

“I am flabbergasted by the court’s reasoning,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak. “It is established caselaw that publishing hyperlinks or torrents (Mininova, Pirate Bay) is *not* the same as a publication. FTD does *less* than what Mininova or Pirate Bay does, but according to the court we are more liable than they are?”

In coming to its decision, the court drew heavily on the earlier Newzbin case.

“They say that FTD is doing the same thing, and since the English courts held Newzbin liable for infringement, FTD must be liable too,” Engelfriet explains. “This completely ignores the technical differences between Newzbin and FTD. Newzbin is an NZB search engine through which you find codes to directly download from Usenet. FTD is a forum where people ‘spot’ movies using messages in ordinary Dutch.”

FTD had argued that it was not guilty of “making available” because copyrighted files on Usenet are not under its control – it does not control the servers and it has no influence over potential downloaders. The court decided that this is irrelevant. What is important, it said, is “whether the behavior of FTD allows users to download copyrighted files (in an easier manner) and thus makes such files available to the public.” The court ruled that it did.

“This is a collaboration between FTD and its users where they knowingly provide access to unauthorized files,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a comment. “It’s clear that this is more than just talking about files like FTD wants people to believe.“

In October this year FTD will face another court case. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN says that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal, and wants the entire site shut down.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

That action was forced by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN who are making more than their fair share of headlines recently, and who are about to make even more. While successfully demanding that Mininova remove links to infringing content, BREIN have never really made inroads into getting the actual infringing content removed from the Internet – but all that could be about to change.

In a fairly bold move even by their standards, the anti-piracy group headed up by Tim Kuik has initiated legal action to force a Usenet service provider, much like Giganews or Newshosting, to start proactively filtering content from the worldwide newsgroup system.

The small seven-employee Usenet company News-Service.com is being sued by BREIN on claims that it facilitates copyright infringement and is demanding that the company ceases to offer copyright material or face fines of 50,000 euros per day.

Technical director of News-Service.com Patrick Schreurs strongly refutes BREIN’s claims and says that his company only provides access to Usenet and maintains that it is a mere conduit of information.

“BREIN’s move is comparable to suing a postal service for shipping illicit goods,” he said.

Schreurs’ assertion that trying to check up to 20 million daily Usenet messages is an impossibility raises a very real concern. If a legal requirement to filter perfectly, as was the case with Mininova, is implemented against News-Service (on pain of 50,000 euros per day in fines) the company could not carry this burden for long. If BREIN gets their way, Schreurs says the company will have to stop providing Usenet access.

News-Service already operates a Notice-and-Takedown system but, as was the case with Mininova, BREIN is not satisfied with its scope or performance.

“We were under the assumption that with this procedure we met the wishes of BREIN and that we would work on a solution together,” said Schreurs. “We regret the fact that BREIN has chosen a different course with this [legal] action.”

The case, the first of its type against a Usenet provider in The Netherlands, was heard on April 19th and the judge is expected to announce his decision early next month.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BREIN’s lawyer argued that since The Pirate Bay is responsible for millions of copyright infringements every day, the site should be blocked to visitors from The Netherlands.

BREIN won that case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to block Dutch users before March 1st 2010 or face penalties of 5,000 euros per person, per day.

The defendants, who claimed they were not responsible for the site’s operations, announced they would not appeal the decision. However, since they said they were no longer involved with the site, they therefore don’t have the ability to block Dutch users either. Indeed, The Pirate Bay remains accessible to the Dutch to this day.

But of course, there is another technique which the movie industry can use to have sites blocked which doesn’t involve suing sites like The Pirate Bay. As pioneered in several other countries by the music industry, BREIN appears to be going after Dutch ISPs.

According to information received by TorrentFreak, BREIN has begun threatening Dutch ISP Ziggo in an attempt to force them to block The Pirate Bay. Ziggo is the largest cable Internet provider in The Netherlands and in 2009 pulled in nearly 1.3 billion euros in revenue from its 7.2 million Internet, TV and telephone customers.

Our source, who has provided us with credible information in the past, says that BREIN is demanding that Ziggo implements a block on the following grounds:

1. The Pirate Bay is guilty of large scale copyright infringement
2. The Pirate Bay founders have been convicted
3. The Pirate Bay refuses to work with rights holders to solve piracy issues
4. Ziggo can easily block the site with simple technical measures.

BREIN is apparently threatening Ziggo with Article 6:162 of the Dutch Civil Code which reads:

“A person who commits an unlawful act against another which is attributable to him, must repair the damage suffered by the other in consequence thereof.”

To this end, BREIN wants Ziggo to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay, with any future domain names and IP addresses of the site to be blocked within 24 hours of notification by BREIN. This demand is similar to a court order that is currently in effect in Italy, one that is also easy to bypass for tech-savvy users.

TorrentFreak contacted BREIN boss Tim Kuik who politely told us that he had no comment.

At the time of publication a request to Ziggo’s press office for comment remains unanswered.

Update: Ziggo is refusing to co-operate with BREIN’s request.

“There is no legal basis for this request,” says a Ziggo announcement. “We are just a conduit. We provide people access to the Internet and have nothing to do with that website. Moreover, we favor public Internet.”

Article from: TorrentFreak.

NFOrce communicated this request to the owner of the site, who had no other option than to move his site to a hosting provider outside The Netherlands. The alternative – facing legal battle against BREIN in court – was not a viable option for the site’s operator.

Soon after BREIN’s request, Torrentbit moved to a Swedish hosting provider, hoping that its issues with BREIN were solved. Previously, many sites have moved outside The Netherlands after threats from BREIN, including BTjunkie, Demonoid and What.cd.

Relocating has solved the issues for the aforementioned sites, but not for Torrentbits. Aside from using NFOrce as a hosting provider, the company also acted as the domain registrar for the .nl domain the site was using. So, in a second attempt to shut Torrentbit down, BREIN sent a request to NFOrce to make the domain unavailable.

NFOrce did not comply with this request immediately, but saw no other option than to do so if Torrentbit’s owners did not make their identity know to BREIN so they could fight this out between themselves. Again, this was not a viable option for the Torrentbit administrator.

“In order to be confident of my site’s future I decided to change domain to a .net extension and make it not so dependent on Dutch laws and existing court decisions,” Torrentbit founder Torro told TorrentFreak when explaining the recent domain change.

Torrentbit continues to operate just fine, but one has to wonder where this will end now domain registrars are becoming a target as well. For now these actions seem to be limited to The Netherlands and Russia, but in the United States the RIAA and MPAA are lobbying for registrars to disable ‘infringing’ sites as well.

It is obvious that BREIN is very creative in using verdicts of previous court cases as ammunition to put pressure on webhosting companies and also domain registrars. With two hosting providers having lost their cases against BREIN in court, it seems that most others would rather comply than put up a costly fight.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

With their increasing popularity among the masses it is inevitable that eBooks will become more widely pirated online. At the moment though, largely due to the fact that a relatively small number of people have eBook readers, piracy remains fairly low.

Having kept a close eye on the state of music piracy, where small files are traded with ease and at will, some book publishers have already taken action against sites which have assisted in the spread of electronic books.

In 2008, the 100,000 member TextBoook Torrents finally folded under the threat of lawsuits and in February this year several large book publishers filed a lawsuit against file-hosting site, RapidShare.

Their lawsuit cited 148 book titles and demanded that RapidShare stop them being made available to the public via their service. The District Court in Hamburg handed down a preliminary ruling against RapidShare which granted the request.

Now the signs are that other publishers are digging their trenches ready for a battle.

Publishers association GAU has just announced that it began working with anti-piracy group BREIN this month. Together they will attempt to combat the online piracy of eBooks in a pilot exercise which will last until at least January 2011.

In keeping with the skills it acquired going after dozens of lesser known file-sharing sites and forums offering links to movies, BREIN will now also monitor the Internet for sites and services facilitating the spread of eBooks. BitTorrent, Usenet and various other file-sharing sites will be targeted, including forums which offer links to material on sites such as Rapidshare. The file-hosters themselves will also be ordered to remove infringing content, rendering undiscovered links useless.

For smaller infringements it’s believed BREIN will issue a takedown request, but for the bigger ones it can be presumed that BREIN will operate as normal, by using existing legal decisions to force site owners to close their operations under the threat of overwhelming legal might. According to GAU, BREIN have already had some successes but it is believed these are against individuals selling illegal copies of eBooks rather than giving them away for free.

Not everyone in the book industry is equally excited about BREIN’s expansion plans. Author Karin Spaink is one of the most vocal opponents. “I don’t want my intellectual property rights to be abused by BREIN so they can restrict your and my civil rights,” she wrote in a recent blog post.

For BREIN, however, it makes perfect sense to bring in new clients to help cover increasing legal costs. After all, if they are to take down a site (such as the recent MasterNZB) for infringing movie copyrights, why not bring in another paymaster and take it down for infringing eBook copyrights at the same time? Even more revenue for the same amount of work sounds like a very good business plan.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

What followed was more than 5 years of legal battles in both civil and criminal court cases. In the criminal case the operator of ShareConnector came out as the winner in 2007 and was released from all charges.

The court ruled that the authorities failed to provide any evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement nor enough to prove that it was criminal in nature. In addition, the judge ruled that the initial arrests were unlawful as the evidence provided by BREIN was insufficient.

After this decision ShareConnector came back online. However, this comeback was short lived as local anti-piracy outfit BREIN initiated a civil lawsuit, trying to prevent the operator from keeping the site up and running. This lawsuit was won by BREIN but the ShareConnector operator decided to appeal the ruling.

This week a court announced the verdict of the appeal and it came out negative once again. Although the court ruled that the operator of ShareConnector wasn’t guilty of copyright infringement, it said the site must remain closed for good. The judge ruled that sites that offer hash links (like .torrent links) are facilitating copyright infringement, an unlawful behavior.

The outcome of the case is disappointing to aDI, the operator of the site, who further said that it didn’t surprise him. He had hoped, however, that the ruling in the appeal would be in line with recent cases in Spain where P2P indexing sites were deemed legal.

“The results are just what I expected, so nothing surprising here considering all the similar recent cases with just about the same conclusion we see here. The trend has been set by those ignorant old judges that fail to see the logic, contradicting the rulings from Spain,” said aDi in a response to the verdict.

“Unfortunately this is not Spain, the Dutch legal system is dysfunctional, lacking logic and professionalism. Why does it take more than five years and so many criminal trials to prove a simple fact? How come all the pathetic private organizations whose main interest is money and not the artists, get away with lies and deceptions spreading their propaganda in the media?,” he added.

What remains for the ShareConnector operator is the appeal of the criminal case that will be heard in April. In 2007 he was released from all charges, but after two years the Department of Justice filed the appeal. The charges in this case are membership of a criminal organization and (assisting in) the distribution of copyrighted material. The additional charges of copyright infringement were dropped last week.

In the upcoming trial Dr. Johan Pouwelse will appear as an expert witness on behalf of the defendant. Since downloading copyrighted films and music is not illegal in The Netherlands, he is expected to testify that there are various ways for eDonkey users to disable the upload feature. Whatever the outcome of the criminal trial, ShareConnector will never return.

Article from: TorrentFreak.