Judge Rules Takedown of Pirate Party General Proxy Illegal

CAPSLOCK2000 writes "The Dutch Pirate Party (PPNL) just won a court-case against BREIN. Last week BREIN got a court to issue an emergency order to take down a reverse-proxy to The Pirate Bay. The next day BREIN claimed the court order also included a generic proxy also ran by PPNL and any other service that might lead to TPB (aka hyperlinks). PPNL responded with an emergency lawsuit of their own, asking for a literal interpretation of the verdict instead of BREIN's broad reading. The judge acknowledged the narrow interpretation of the verdict. proxy.piratenpartij.nl stays up and tpb.piratenpartij.nl now sports a list of other ways to reach The Pirate Bay. Due to the Streisand effect this list has grown to a considerable length. Noteworthy is that The Pirate Party got favorable verdict in a single day, a first in Dutch law." Full verdict (in Dutch). This is only a temporary order by the judge to keep the general-purpose proxy run by the Pirate Party and the list of alternative proxies to the Pirate Bay online. A full case hearing is expected on April 24th.

Piracy is fast becoming a civic duty

[mykos]

Clearly the anti-piracy outfits have no respect for the law; perhaps people should start doing what they can to quit funding them.

Re:Is there more to say?

[Spad]

Oh I agree, but for the time being we just have to put up with BREIN.

The Netherlands is important because...

[dryriver]

The Netherlands is an important battleground, because 1) the Dutch are strong believers in individual freedoms and rights, and 2) because what happens in the courts in the Netherlands may affect what happens in other EU Zone courts. The Dutch are usually very liberal/libertarian in their political outlook. Its unlikely that the Dutch Public would ever back the Copyright/IP Lobby politically. Dutch Politicians/Bureaucrats, and perhaps also Dutch Courts, sadly, may be a different beast. The "Legal Right to Protect Intellectual Property" may win over the politicos/bureaucrats/judges. Its going to be interesting to see which way this court battle ultimately swings, and how the Dutch Public will react to the results. I personally can't see the Dutch Public backing the IP lobbyists at all. The country is too freedom-loving by nature for the IP Lobbyists to be able to make much of a dent, politically speaking.

Re:Wait a second..

[Calydor]

It may be more accurate to say they won this battle, but the war is not over yet.

Legality of generic proxies

[Hentes]

If generic proxies are considered illegal, what's the next step? Outlawing Tor? Clearly shows that there is no middle ground between free speech and full censorship on the net: if you wan't to effectively censor a content, you have to become an authoritarian power yourself.

Re:The Netherlands is important because...

[hvm2hvm]

Being freedom-loving and pretending to be freedom-loving while actually being apathetic/lazy are two different things.

Re:The Netherlands is important because...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) the Dutch are strong believers in individual freedoms and rights

Same with the USA.

You think so? TSA, Guantanamo, over a decade of poorly-justified wars, attempts to stigmatize abortion through law, the steady lowering of the maximum legal BAC, the so-called "war on drugs", the extremely large prison population including the rise of a for-profit industry with the purpose of imprisoning minors, metal detectors in schools, the rise of the surveillance state, the growing wealth imbalance aided by law, on and on... we claim to love individual rights, but I would not want to have to defend our actions of the last decade or so in a court of my peers. It would be easy to defend the statements that the US loves business and the US loves money, though; I think freedom is in third place here, at best.

Re:Is there more to say?

[i kan reed]

How about we hold people liable when we discover they actually violate a particular copyright, rather than trying to extent tort coverage to criminal concepts like "aiding and abetting". Seriously.

Re:Not piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Now see there's the problem. That won't help you. These organisations have been able to buy laws that in a lot of countries demand you pay them even if you are not listed with any of their organisations and wrote the music yourself. It's the corruption that's involved with these companies not just music that's the issue.

Re:Is there more to say?

[AngryDeuce]

Of all the times to be out of mod points...

The world will be a better place when the MAFIAA is gone. They're a relic from a time when an artist required a middleman to get their art to the masses, and internet has made them largely unnecessary.

I have as much sympathy for them as the first automobile owners had for the harrier. It's progress, baby...

Dinosaurs

[Safety Cap]

Gnash and roar loudly as they sink into the tar pits.

They may hurt teh interwebs [varsity.co.uk] on their way down, but their efforts are futile; culture will never again be produced by the few and consumed only by everyone else.

(BTW, Lessig has a great Ted Talk about how everyone is a content producer now [ted.com].)

Perhaps the MAFIAA think they can turn back the clock because they suffer from Dunning-Kruger [wikipedia.org]? Either way, they need to die and die soon so the rest of us can get on with making badass remixes and fanfic.

Re:Dinosaurs

[Requiem18th]

Or not, I think we are at a breaking point in history where it could go either way.

On the one hand, more and more alternative sources of content have arisen. People spend a lot of their time doing things other than watching movies and television. Social media and user generated content is growing strong, and together with that, advances in technology are making encrypted darknets more and more feasible. Piracy is ubiquitous in the third world and the MAFIAA and RIAA are almost uniformly hated by everyone who knows who they are and what they do, except the people who directly benefit from them. The rejection of SOPA/PIPA marked an historical event where a huge mass of people aligned to make an International protest that effectively stopped a horrible set of laws from being enacted.

However, modern versions of Windows, as well as Android and iOS are getting increasingly draconian. We now have hardware that can't dual boot and extensive DRM support in both software and hardware. Videogame consoles are becoming just encrypted hard drives where "content" is rented in smaller and smaller pieces to milk as much possible from the gamers. Each day more and more people are surrendering more of their live to "the cloud" and the cloud is getting more and more aggressive about what it can do with your information. It is quite possible that we are heading to a new dark age where all computers are nothing but telescreens out of the control of their users. Sure, you will always be able to install ubuntu/mint/debian on your devices, if you want to, but if you install the distro of your choice, the DRM won't work, you won't be able to watch the movies youpaid for, your hacked phone won't connect to the VOIP service of your choice, maybe your ISP will deny you service for using a "rouge OS" known to enable piracy and terrorism. Hell, maybe you won't even be able to see your friends' pictures on facebook once facebooks makes a mandatory app for accessing pictures, obviously a security feature against Child Porn and also send them to the printer with cute virtual stickers and BTW it is the *only* way to print them, on your printer which also refuses to work without DRM and can only be used with the factory approved OS.

It really could go both ways at this point.