The Dutch!!!

Dutch Anti-Piracy Group Targeted The Pirate Party

After BREIN won a lawsuit against a proxy operator for providing access to The Pirate Bay, it now decided to target local Pirate Party for the same reason.
The process started this past January when a couple of Dutch major Internet service providers (Ziggo and XS4ALL) received court orders to block access to the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Since then, local pirates have been trying to circumvent the methods of censorship by using proxy. After anti-piracy outfit successfully won a legal battle against proxy service tpb.dehomies.nl, it has locked its cannons on the next target – the Dutch Pirate Party. The latter received a letter from BREIN in which it asked for Pirate Bay proxy site tpb.piratenpartij.nl to be immediately closed.

Of course, The Pirate Party doesn’t want to follow the same path as their predecessors. The party is ready to take the fight into the court, and they have already sent a letter to the anti-piracy outfit informing that the website will continue operating. The interesting fact is that the Pirate Party has chosen to send the letter via a torrent file hosted on the website in discussion.

The Pirate Party’s chairman called the demands “ridiculous”, saying that a private lobbying outfit shouldn’t be allowed to filter the country’s web. The party was also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, which threatened Dutch minors with fines of 1000 euros per day for running the proxy service. However, the Pirate Party is sure that the efforts of the anti-piracy outfit are useless, saying that there are a lot of proxy websites online, and most of them allow to reach The Pirate Bay, even with a single URL. Meanwhile, BREIN is accused by the industry experts of bringing substantial damage to the free and open web.

In the letter, the anti-piracy outfit included a screenshot of the site’s logo which, ironically, supports indie musicians. Taking into account that the Dutch Pirate Party isn’t happy with paying fines, they believe it is their duty to fight back. The party’s representative points out that unless someone calls BREIN on its tactics, the outfit will be allowed to continue those tactics indefinitely, and yielding doesn’t make the problem go away. The party would prefer to tackle this issue in parliament, as it belongs there.