Dutch Court Forces ISPs To Block the Pirate Bay

New submitter swinferno writes "After recent successes in Finland, Italy and Belgium, the Dutch Copyright protection organization BREIN has obtained a verdict that forces two major ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay domains and gives them the right to submit future domains/IP addresses to be blocked in the future without court order."

Comments

Et tu, Netherlands?

[elrous0]

And from a country where a man once gave his life for freedom of speech, no less.

They once fought the Nazi's, but now they drop to their knees before the entertainment industry.

Re:Et tu, Netherlands?

[kdemetter]

Blocking The Pirate Bay, is also suppressing freedom of speech. There's a blog on it, for example.
Someone could also use it too hosts it's own creations, and ask feedback on it trough the comments.
And it could be used to host content criticizing a regime, controversial opinions , etc...

The Pirate Bay does advocate free speech, though obviously they see it broader ( freedom of information ).

So any country blocking TPB , is fighting piracy ( though very unsuccessfully ) , and is suppressing freedom of speech at the same time.
Any file sharer will find a way to work around it, so this does nothing to stop piracy. Torrents and magnet links remain accessible.

However, actual free speech, like the opinions of users, blog entries, are now inaccessible to the user just wants to visit the site .
So it does a lot more harm to free speech, then that it does anything against piracy.

Re:Et tu, Netherlands?

[tsa]

That's why they have that blog, so they can claim that blocking their site is a violation of freedom of speech.

Re:Et tu, Netherlands?

[Moryath]

The start of said world war was when a certain political party came to power on a racist platform, spouting about how "the foreigners" had destroyed a certain country, and proceeded to eliminate any newspaper or news outlet that wasn't a part of their propaganda machine.

Then they came up with even worse things to do. But it started with propaganda and censorship.

Re:Et tu, Netherlands?

[CastrTroy]

Everyone agrees that hiring a hitman is illegal. Or that the guy driving the get-away car for a bank robbery is also doing something illegal. So we at least have some legal precedent that not actually doing an illegal act, but enabling it is an illegal act is itself a crime. If they actually made some honest effort to remove torrents pointed to copyrighted content then I might have some sympathy for them. But they don't. They know they are enabling people to break copyright laws. What if they took the original movie files, reversed them, added a header to make them look like giant BMPs with randomly colored pixles, and then served them up like that. Sorry, we only host big random image files here, it's just a coincidence that you can use that data to easily derive the latest blockbuster movie.

Re:Et tu, Netherlands?

[FreeUser]

The very act of providing copyrighted material for download without permission from the copyright holders is prima facie copyright violation in almost all legal systems that have copyright systems in place.

The pirate bay has done none of those things.

This argument that you and some others are making is stupid on its face, and frankly dishonest as well, the equivalent of a looter saying "Oh yeah? Prove that this stuff isn't mine".

Actually, your comment is what is stupid (or at least ignorant, as in, completely uninformed). The pirate bay posts links to 3rd party sites that may or may not contain downloadable content that is being made available in violation of copyright.

If you are going to target the pirate bay, you must also target Bing, Google, and every other search engine out there. It's a dangerous precedent, one that threatens the entire Internet as we know it.

And I say that as one who (1) does not use the pirate bay (but has looked at the site to see what the fuss is about), (2) creates copyrighted material myself, and (3) values both the Internet and freedom of expression it facilitates over short-term tactical moves trying to reduce copyright violations. Even if they were effective the price in terms of our freedoms wouldn't be worth it. The fact that they are so ineffective as to be laughable, shows either the stupidity of those promoting such methods or, more likely, as these people are generally not stupid, the underlying agenda they are pursuing that has nothing to do with copyright violations and everything to do with suppressing speach within western democracies while maintaining plausible deniability with the wider, uninformed public. ACTA and SOPA are the logical next steps in this progression, at which point it won't be irresponsible sites like the pirate bay that are at risk, but any site, anywhere, where anyone says anything the content cartels don't like, including probably just about any criticism of copyright law, present or future (or for that matter, anything any ruling government or influencial corporate cartel doesn't like).

It's nearly game over dude. Live in denial at your own risk.

Griefing

[Aladrin]

This has the potential for some serious griefing. Since they'll keep blocking IPs and such, obviously TPB needs new IPs constantly. Cloud time! How many of Amazon's IPs do you think they'll have to block before realizing that they're blocking legit sites, too?

Re:Right to submit future domains, but

[Commontwist]

Holly - A green plant with berries used for festive purposes and slightly toxic to humans.

Hollywood.

By George, you're right!