In 2004, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took down the once large ed2K link site ShareConnector, which had aided in finding files (or parts of files) on the eDonkey2000 network with software such as eMule.
The site came back in 2006 but in 2007, the admin Adi was taken to trial and acquitted of any complicity to criminal copyright infringement. After that, the site went down and now remains as a host for eDonkey and other tutorials.
Interestingly today however, Adi added a blog post saying that BREIN is back to appeal the 2007 case, and a court case is upcoming.
Says the post:
Recently, I got a letter from the Department of Justice, stating that they want a re-trial which they desperately lost back in July 24 2007.
I’m really surprised that they want another shot at trying to make us look as criminals. Nobody expected the DoJ to go for an appeal after an embarrassing defeat 2 years ago.
The defendants are to appear proforma on 22 September 2009 in The Hague. On 18 November 2009 the re-trial should take place. Both ShareConnector and Releases4u (dutch ed2k site we are not affiliated with but was hosted on our ISP) including the former ShareConnector host are to appear in court.
This has nothing to do with the recent civil case against BREIN, where I went for an appeal. That appeal should take place within a few months as well.
So this year is really packed with lawsuits for me with hopefully some conclusive results about the legality of eD2k indexing sites in the Netherlands. After the illegal raids by FIOD-ECD who didn’t do any research and blindly followed BREIN back in December 2004, it took years with the criminal court which made so many blunders and now finally this chapter can be closed with the DoJ and civil appeal approaching us.
[More]>>
Result for: brein
The civil trial against Mininova, brought forward by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, has been postponed one month today.
The outcome of the case will determine whether the torrent indexing site will have to “actively filter” torrents from its index daily. If BREIN is triumphant, Mininova will be forced to remove all .torrent files that lead to unauthorized content such as pirated movies, music or TV shows.
“The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case,” says Mininova’s staff.
Additionally, Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer notes:
“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content. In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not.”
Result for: brein
BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit, has announced the complete shutdown of a torrent site “franchise hierarchy” that were all run by an individual who went under the name “Topspinner.”
Last month the outfit took action against 75 torrent sites, each of which used similar templates and charged a fee on sign up. That fee allowed users to download all they want for a certain period of time.
During the initial raids however, the individual in charge managed to slip away but BREIN has now identified and summoned “Topspinner.”
“The owner of the sites which almost all were registered under the alias Topspinner stayed in hiding after the Dutch take down and moved a number of his sites to a German hosting provider. After summons to the German provider, the sites ran to France and Belgium, and finally, after further summons, to Denmark. In meantime BREIN identified the 45 year old man from the Dutch town of Oudenbosch and summoned him yesterday,” said BREIN in a statement.
