Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block Pirate Bay
Two Dutch ISPs have complied with a demand to block the Pirate Bay, but KPN and T-Mobile are refusing to block the site.
T-Mobile at least seems to imply they would respond to a court order, and are merely refusing to take down sites at the request of a private entity.
TechweekEurope, 30 Jan 2012
Two Dutch ISPs have refused to bow to pressure from anti-piracy organisation BREIN to block file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.
T-Mobile and KPN have said that they will not be intimidated by a ‘private party’ and would only block The Pirate Bay if they were required to do so by a court order. The Dutch courts have already forced two ISPs to block the site.
Life of BREIN
Two weeks agao, a court in The Hague ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the Netherlands, and XS4ALL must block access to The Pirate Bay, in what TorrentFreak described as the first ruling to bring “broad censorship to the Netherlands”.
XS4ALL and Ziggo declared themselves “bitterly disappointed” and accused the Dutch authorities of prioritising commercial interests over fundamental rights. But BREIN did not think the verdict went far enough, and applied to have the ruling extended to T-Mobile and KPN, who refused, emphasising the importance of an open internet and suggesting that the entertainment industry find a new business model
The news means that millions of users still have access to The Pirate Bay via their broadband, which is among the fastest in Europe – at least, for now. It is expected that BREIN will launch legal action.
UK ISP BT was told to block The Pirate Bay in November last year by the High Court, while Google continues to voluntarily omit a number of file sharing sites from its auto-complete and instant search services.
The four owners of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright theft and sentenced to one year in prison by a Swedish court in 2009, although one of the defendants has attempted to have his conviction overturned by appealing to the country’s Supreme Court.
END
Pirate Bay is still up and running although it did go down for a while during the legal close downs. They have been closed down now in the past few years, at least three times by having their servers seized by Court Orders
.