Dutch Court of Appeals overturns Pirate Bay IP blockade

http://bureaubrandeis.com/duly-noted/court-appeals-denies-ip-block/

by koenrh • 12 years ago

163 54 12 years ago

neals2• 12 years ago

I think it's nice to live in a country where courts still exist that are not influenced by lobbyist and politics. Especially since BREIN has been ordered to repay the 326.000 in court fees.

skrebbel• 12 years ago

And where internet providers owned by publicly traded corporations actually spend time and money fighting in court.

gnur• 12 years ago

And where an internet provider not even included in the original case joined in only for the pursuing justice. XS4ALL has always claimed to be fighting for a free internet, with this case, they proved it to me.

nubbee• 12 years ago

Apparently the judge who issued the original verdict had connections with BREIN' lawyer.

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-judge-is-corru...

tluyben23• 12 years ago

Yeah , this has been well documented everywhere, including in discussions on HN.

davedx• 12 years ago

I work for the parent company of Ziggo. Good to feel like I was somehow connected to this victory, in however a small way! :)

twobits• 12 years ago

It's scary that the fees where so high. (Not in the sense "I am a corp, I throw millions in my legal dept", but in the sense "if I, a person, gets sued, I am so fing fed".)

staticelf• 12 years ago

Too bad I live in a country where it's possible and too easy to buy the courts (Sweden).

belorn• 12 years ago

One of the few a great judgment in recent time. It is nice to see that cost–benefit still count for something, rather than emotional response backed by government control.

It has been around 200 years, and society has changed for the better by it. Every time government trail away from it, especially in punishment, it seem to be caused by corruption. Good that the Court of Appeals of The Hague can recognize and see it.

furyg32• 12 years ago

This is subjective, but as an American living in NL I've been fairly impressed with the Dutch government's (parliament, cities, unions, within parties, and courts) pragmatism.

While there are cases of people maintaining hard-line statements, it seems to be less common than in normal US discourse.

troels• 12 years ago

Probably, the common law vs. Civil law has a lot to do with that.

Someone2• 12 years ago

Not having any party with anything close to a majority in parliament helps enormously here (that might be a symptom, rather than a cause, though)

There are very few things that you will find a straight majority for in parliament, so hard-lining will get you nowhere.

sanityinc• 12 years ago

Seems like this would open the way for the UK ISPs which are currently obliged to block torrent sites to get that requirement overturned. BT and others pushed back against it in the first place, IIRC.

sdfjkl2• 12 years ago

Only if the legislation there also permits doing away with ineffective measures. Not to mention that this will then lead to a push for more effective ones.

hrkristian• 12 years ago

I'm always intrigued by the lack of vision shown by organisations like BREIN. Blocking an IP address will not block an idea deeply embedded in the mindset of almost whole generations.

It is, after all, "common knowledge" distribution has shifted, and pirates use this at every turn to justify their actions.

A copy is not theft, it is a copy, final.
The money I didn't spend on this movie was already earmarked for another purpose; nothing changed.

There's a social aspect, too.

All my friends are pirating, if I do not, I fall behind; there is no choice.

Like an empire or a dynasty, the entertainment business is simply too entrenched; disconnected from the real world, to realise they are the ones at fault. It's not a question of ethics (we made it, we earned it, abide by our wishes), it's a matter of majority opinion.

It's refreshing to see this result, I just hope it sprung from correct reasoning, blocking any form of information should be done under the harshest of scrutinies, which means not just for the sake of attempting the sate a billion-dollar industry.

Used to be a time, when capitalism meant keeping with the times or succumbing to it. This sometimes feels eerily reminiscent of what I was taught about Soviet Russia: keeping their factories and businesses going at all costs, because the 5-year-plan was more important than progress.

USSR did not need billions of buckets, we do not need billions of optical disks.

blauwbilgorgel• 12 years ago

The vision of BREIN is not build on killing piracy, it is to secure funding. BREIN gets most of its funding from Hollywood. It is a commercial institution: If they generate lots of anti-piracy press they get more, or easier-to-get funds, if they are not visible they get less, or harder-to-get funds. BREIN does not necessarily have to kill piracy to secure its funding. It just needs to raise a stink. If they killed piracy they would also kill themselves.

The blocking of TBP and all known proxy IP's was a huge stink. Persistent pirates will find it easy to circumvent this. They may even abandon public tracker torrents and flock to Usenet. I think the goal is to make the life of the common pirate more difficult. Many moms and pops only knew how to download a movie from TPB. Once they saw the "The court ordered us to block this page" they stopped watching movies or went back to ordering DVDs.

Just a few weeks ago BREIN send its threatening letters to amateur subtitle sites and their uploaders (for unlicensed derivative works). Piracy on the whole will not be hampered when pirates can't download the Dutch subtitles to an English movie. Just a few kids, deaf people and older folk who have trouble understanding English, or the few anime lovers who can't fully speak Japanese. So what _have_ they accomplished with this? A big stink. A nice report to give to those that fund them. Shown that they are willing to align themselves with Hollywood's agenda (I bet the idea to start going after subtitle sites originally came from there). Shown that they are deserving of (more) funds.

If we all agree that facilitating copyright infringement is against the law, then blocking sites that exist to facilitate copyright infringement does not seem too harsh or close to censorship to me. If you want to avoid sites being closed for being against the law, then lobby to change/overhaul copyright law.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

All my friends are pirating, if I do not, I fall behind; there is no choice.

This is probably the strongest incentive for piracy in a country like the Netherlands: if you don't, you cannot join in the next day watercooler/schoolyard talk about the latest episode of show X, let alone your global virtual friends on various forums and communities.

Stopping people from consuming your product without scarcity must be the most insane business model ever. At least the communist failure to deliver was a side-effect, not a deliberate strategy.

However, let's not pretend the entrenched entertainment industry is the only one making this mistake. Tech start-ups often fail to realize that they are launching in a global market from day one.

sentenza• 12 years ago

The fight against Bittorrent is more important than many realize. If "they" get away with destroying a technology (after all, it's only a protocol) for something as unimportant as copyright, we're truly fucked.

tomp2• 12 years ago

for something as unimportant as money

Fixed that for you. Music and movies are huge industries.

BTW, I think they are loosing. Sure, some laws are being passed, but there are several generations alive today that consider piracy something normal and natural. It's all a matter of who is in charge; today's leaders are old, they don't consider piracy to be good and normal. When we (our generation) become old and get in charge, we'll embed our worldviews in the laws.

chii2• 12 years ago

except it seems to be that those who pirate (or consider piracy "normal") are not those who are going to be the elites that sit in parliment and make laws.

mnw21cam• 12 years ago

What are they loosing? There doesn't seem to be much evidence of them setting anything free at the moment.

GrinningFool• 12 years ago

When we (our generation) become old and get in charge, we'll embed our worldviews in the laws.

Part of getting maturing and growing up almost always includes a changing of worldviews as we gain more experience in the world.

THings like piracy - which once seemed perfectly acceptable when you are younger - can begin to seem a lot more like 'not paying for the work of the people that went into it'.

This is particularly true as people enter the workforce from school and over time begin to appreciate the actual value of what they produce, and its real-world implications.

I can't count the number of comments I've seen in recent years that start with a variation "I used to pirate..."

rayiner• 12 years ago

They're not losing, the center of power is just shifting. Netflix isn't any more okay with weakening copyright protections for its home-grown content than Disney or Universal.

malandrew• 12 years ago

Music is actually much much much smaller than people realize. It's given as much importance as movies, but I don't even think it's 1/10 the size of movies.

alkonaut2• 12 years ago

Surely "Bittorrrent" and "The pirate bay" are two separate things? In what way are they destroying bittorrent by attacking a single tracker/index? Isn't that analoguous to saying that trying to block or shut down any random web server serving something illegal is an attack on HTTP?

rplnt2• 12 years ago

Many ISPs block or limit torrent traffic, whatever the content. Mine has been doing this as far as I can remember. Have to use encrypted mode only.

duaneb• 12 years ago

Legally, what separates shutting down The Pirate Bay from any other arbitrary tracker?

Confusion• 12 years ago

This is not about bittorrent. The ISP's were required to block IP addresses and DNS entries. They were not required to block bittorrent traffic

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

They did not really "denied" it. Their conclusion was: it just doesn't help. So we are taking away the possibility to block piratebay.

The only result (according to the judge) is that less frequent downloaders look for alternatives.

PS. Still glad that something like this just happens. Entertainment industry allowed firms like Netflix to rise because of their lack of vision, it's easy to blame the internet...

tluyben23• 12 years ago

I think a lot of people would flock to legal alternatives if there were any. As long as there are not...

chii2• 12 years ago

flock to legal alternatives

legal and cheaper. The entrenched publishers of yesteryear's media still makes their products available at outrageous prices. I m glad netflix exists, but the media companies don't like the way technology is making distribution a commodity (where they extract their value from).

dublinben• 12 years ago

The legal services are still largely inferior to the alternatives. Most require proprietary software, DRM, a US (or other national) IP address, an always-on internet connection, a credit card, or other cumbersome anti-features.

neals2• 12 years ago

The ISP just said on the news that the blockade that they had to apply since 2012 was actually very helpful for their case. Independent research (from TNO) showed no decline in torrent traffic and literally no effect of the blockade. The judge ruled the blockade "ineffective" and said "there are other means of copyright protection that make more sense".

brokenparser3• 12 years ago

TIL TNO is the new NSA

hnisnotreddit• 12 years ago

congrats. you compelled me to create an account.

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Dutch Court of Appeals overturns Pirate Bay IP blockade

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