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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."
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The verdict also said that if they submit non-TPB domains or ip's and violate that court decision, they will be legally liable.
The Dutch ISP XS4ALL just decided to appeal again. They might win since BREIN based their offence on some very (VERY) poorly done statistics.
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?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Don't worry, the more they tighten their grip the more files will slip through their fingers.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Try to take over the world again
Thanks to international law, which in almost every country supercedes national laws. So more and more often you are seeing contraints being applied to countries in the form of international treaties as a sort of end run around a country's government (which can either vote for or against the whole treaty package and not bits of it).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Not as intellectually dishonest as trying to equate copyright infringement with theft, or conflating copyright infringement with "organised crime" or "terrorism", as the copyright lobby has consistently done.
When these people face up to the fact that their business model is akin to monasteries claiming the right to license the right to print bibles because their scribes deserve a living, maybe they will see that they should be doing something else.
If that means that fewer Mission Impossible - XVI rehashes are made, then so be it - if something is worth creating, someone will create it and will find a way to make money from it without stretching the dubious logic of the legal system beyond its limits.
I have never "pirated" anything, nor would I do so, but to come down on the side of the parasitic and doomed rights holders rather than facing reality is frankly stupid.
Bread and circuses. The powerful cannot maintain their grip on power without bread and circuses to keep the people placated. We wouldn't want people having free time to reflect and come up with their own ideas, would we?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The media industry are the makers of popularity. Without their blessing, a politician is dead fish. So no politician would dare to oppose this media cartel, lest he or she loses all public(ized) support.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
If you enter into google "site:thepiratebay.org" followed by whatever you were looking for, it will bring up cached copies of TPB pages. The magnet links are just text. So does the court order block Google's cached pages also, or is this a trivial workaround?
>They are just doing what the United States is telling them to do.
>Honestly, Why are the Citizens of the Netherlands allowing the USA To dictate their own laws? Why are you people not protesting in the streets over this stuff?
>>>You honestly think there would be no copyright laws abroad without American pressure? Really?
No, no, no, that's not the argument about US influence on copyright laws and other IP laws of other countries. They had their own laws before -- and even before the US joined the Berne Copyright Convention. Mostly they were better balanced too.
What the lobbying influence has done is to insinuate changes that skew the balance that used to be set, between the authors'/publishers' interests and the public interest.
Copyright terms have been drastically lengthened. New infringement offences have been created in the law. New procedural powers have been introduced that can lead to new claims, often enabling control of materials and works that are not even in copyright and would not be eligible for copyright at all (like the 'TPM's that can be used to padlock anything, copyright or not).
On the other hand, look what has become of the parts of the law that were intended to ensure public rights broadly equivalent to 'fair use': in some places they used to go farther, in others not so far, as in the US. They have been narrowed, whittled down, even taken away from some classes of user entirely, under the influence of this lobbying pressure.
And why or how has it been happening? It often isn't the 'citizens' or even their legislatures primarily doing this. These insidious cripplings of public rights often come in through the relatively new channel of international treaties or EU directives carved out in private conferences, not in legislative assemblies. 'Poison pills' of rights removal have been insinuated as part of larger packages: their design has been fixed so that for some larger and usually economic reason, the 'victim country' won't refuse the 'poison pill', so as not to lose whatever the unrelated material was.
Then, what happens in the local legislative assembly is that the mass of lawmakers are held by their bought-and-sold government executives as if at pistol-point, with a dilemma: they can either rubberstamp the whole thing or reject the whole thing. But the design has fixed it so that the latter will be practically infeasible.
The democratic legislative process is not primarily to blame here, it is the sharks who have bypassed it and subverted it that are to blame.
-wb-
BREIN have a history of playing fast and loose with the law, and the artists they claim to represent. Dutch performer Melchior Rietveldt wrote music for a BREIN anti-piracy video, on the condition that it was only used at a local film festival. BREIN then apparently re-purposed the music for a number of retail DVDs, without bothering to pay Rietveldt, or even ask him.
... in return for a 33% cut.
Worse, Rietveldt claims that when he discovered BREIN's omission and contacted a local recording rights group seeking restitution, nothing happened - until a BREIN board member Jochem Gerrits (who also owned a music label) contacted him to offer a deal. Gerrits would get BREIN to pay up