14 ms·

Dutch Court of Appeals overturns Pirate Bay IP blockade

163 points by koenrh 13y ago

neals 13y 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".
- brokenparser 13y ago
  TIL TNO is the new NSA
  - hnisnotreddit 13y ago
    congrats. you compelled me to create an account. https://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/q/image/1365/86/1365867839932.jpg https://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/q/image/1365/86/13...
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      Go back to 4chan ;)
neals 13y 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 13y ago
  And where internet providers owned by publicly traded corporations actually spend time and money fighting in court.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnur 13y 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 13y ago
  Apparently the judge who issued the original verdict had connections with BREIN' lawyer. http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-judge-is-corrupt-claims-pirate-party-founder-120512/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-judge-is-corru...
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    Yeah , this has been well documented everywhere, including in discussions on HN.
- davedx 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
Too bad I live in a country where it's possible and too easy to buy the courts (Sweden).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
belorn 13y 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.
- furyg3 13y 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 13y ago
    Probably, the common law vs. Civil law has a lot to do with that.
    - furyg3 13y ago
      I'm not sure. Civil codified law would make the judiciary less able to say "well, we tried X, it doesn't work, let's do something else". Anyway, I'm referring to something more broad than that. While Dutch politics is still, well... politics, it seems like there is much more of a pragmatic approach. People expect the government to be effective. "Is policy X working or not?" is a common theme on the news, there are lots of statistics and reports, and politicians aren't trying to always spin their way out of them (though it certainly still happens, just less). The whole society is a lot less concerned with black and white framings like grand economic theories, philosophical stances on law and order, or enforcing morality. They're more concerned with things working.
  - Someone 13y 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 13y 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.
- sdfjkl 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
sentenza 13y 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.
- tomp 13y 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.
  - chii 13y 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.
    - higherpurpose 13y ago
      Haven't they linked piracy coming from Senate IP's? I think it's already happening in Congress. I also think you're underestimating how many people have pirated something at least once a year. Perhaps some are the kind of people who "always pay for their music and shows", since it's relatively cheap to begin with, but then go and pirate something like Adobe Photoshop.
    - tomp 13y ago
      I don't think it matters. As long as it's their siblings, parents and kids.
  - mnw21cam 13y ago
    What are they loosing? There doesn't seem to be much evidence of them setting anything free at the moment.
NicoJuicy 13y 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...
- tluyben2 13y ago
  I think a lot of people would flock to legal alternatives if there were any. As long as there are not...
  - chii 13y 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).
    - tluyben2 13y ago
      True, but I think most solutions which are legal in the US now are cheaper right? But it's quite simple (I know a lot of EU based people agree with it); as long as we cannot watch everything the US can watch at the moment the US can watch it (in English, not dubbed as is normal in DE, ES and probably other countries), people will aggressively pirate anything there is. No-one is going to wait for a sports program, movie or show for months after it airs in the US; that time has passed because on Facebook/Twitter/whatever everyone already is talking about that show/movie so you want to have instant gratification. And while everyone seems to do meditation these days, mustering patience for their favorite program is not one of the skills picked up. It makes me angry when I travel to Spain for business or vacation and suddenly all my devices want to connect to the local stores (even though i'm Dutch, I pay in NL etc) and serve me crap in Spanish. Ever watched a dubbed UK/US thriller dubbed in Spanish? It's painful. Not too strange my UK colleagues living there all have proxies and there are thriving proxy and 'torrent setup box' businesses popping up all over the place.

163 points by koenrh 13y ago

neals 13y 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".

brokenparser 13y ago
TIL TNO is the new NSA
- hnisnotreddit 13y ago
  congrats. you compelled me to create an account. https://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/q/image/1365/86/1365867839932.jpg https://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/q/image/1365/86/13...
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    Go back to 4chan ;)

neals 13y 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 13y ago
And where internet providers owned by publicly traded corporations actually spend time and money fighting in court.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- gnur 13y 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 13y ago
Apparently the judge who issued the original verdict had connections with BREIN' lawyer. http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-judge-is-corrupt-claims-pirate-party-founder-120512/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-judge-is-corru...
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Yeah , this has been well documented everywhere, including in discussions on HN.
davedx 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

belorn 13y 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.

furyg3 13y 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 13y ago
  Probably, the common law vs. Civil law has a lot to do with that.
  - furyg3 13y ago
    I'm not sure. Civil codified law would make the judiciary less able to say "well, we tried X, it doesn't work, let's do something else". Anyway, I'm referring to something more broad than that. While Dutch politics is still, well... politics, it seems like there is much more of a pragmatic approach. People expect the government to be effective. "Is policy X working or not?" is a common theme on the news, there are lots of statistics and reports, and politicians aren't trying to always spin their way out of them (though it certainly still happens, just less). The whole society is a lot less concerned with black and white framings like grand economic theories, philosophical stances on law and order, or enforcing morality. They're more concerned with things working.
- Someone 13y 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 13y 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.

sdfjkl 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.

sentenza 13y 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.

tomp 13y 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.
- chii 13y 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.
  - higherpurpose 13y ago
    Haven't they linked piracy coming from Senate IP's? I think it's already happening in Congress. I also think you're underestimating how many people have pirated something at least once a year. Perhaps some are the kind of people who "always pay for their music and shows", since it's relatively cheap to begin with, but then go and pirate something like Adobe Photoshop.
  - tomp 13y ago
    I don't think it matters. As long as it's their siblings, parents and kids.
- mnw21cam 13y ago
  What are they loosing? There doesn't seem to be much evidence of them setting anything free at the moment.

NicoJuicy 13y 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...

tluyben2 13y ago
I think a lot of people would flock to legal alternatives if there were any. As long as there are not...
- chii 13y 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).
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    True, but I think most solutions which are legal in the US now are cheaper right? But it's quite simple (I know a lot of EU based people agree with it); as long as we cannot watch everything the US can watch at the moment the US can watch it (in English, not dubbed as is normal in DE, ES and probably other countries), people will aggressively pirate anything there is. No-one is going to wait for a sports program, movie or show for months after it airs in the US; that time has passed because on Facebook/Twitter/whatever everyone already is talking about that show/movie so you want to have instant gratification. And while everyone seems to do meditation these days, mustering patience for their favorite program is not one of the skills picked up. It makes me angry when I travel to Spain for business or vacation and suddenly all my devices want to connect to the local stores (even though i'm Dutch, I pay in NL etc) and serve me crap in Spanish. Ever watched a dubbed UK/US thriller dubbed in Spanish? It's painful. Not too strange my UK colleagues living there all have proxies and there are thriving proxy and 'torrent setup box' businesses popping up all over the place.