The Pirate Bay Torrents Remain Online Despite Court Order

[DaBees-Knees]

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-torrents-remain-online-despite-court-order-100301/

Last October the Amsterdam Court ruled that three former Pirate Bay operators had to remove a list of ‘infringing’ torrents from the website and block access to Dutch users. The Pirate Bay trio had to comply with the Court’s demands before today, but nothing has changed and it’s unlikely that the Dutch will be shut out of the site in the near future.

In the hope of dismantling BitTorrent’s flagship The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the site’s founders to court this summer. BREIN won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to prevent Dutch users from accessing the site, a decision appealed in October without luck.

In its verdict the Court ruled that the three defendants had to remove a list of torrents from The Pirate Bay that link to copyrighted works. The three defendants and the site itself were not found guilty of copyright infringement, but according to the Court, The Pirate Bay assists in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

The Court gave the defendants until March 1 to remove a list of infringing torrents and to block Dutch users from accessing parts of the site where (.torrent) links to copyrighted files can be downloaded. If the three did not comply they would face penalties of 3,000 euros per person, per day.

This ultimatum passed today and thus far no changes have been made to The Pirate Bay. Dutch users can still access all parts of the site and from the looks of it no torrent files have been removed. To the three defendants this comes as no surprise because they always claimed that they have no control over the site anymore.

Peter Sunde, former Pirate Bay spokesman and one of the defendants in this case, told TorrentFreak last week that he doubted that anything would change. Sunde also repeated what was said in Court by their lawyers. The three defendants are no longer in charge of The Pirate Bay and can’t comply with the Court order even if they wanted to.

For BREIN, who celebrated the verdict as a grand victory, The Pirate Bay’s continued operation in The Netherlands is likely to be received as a huge setback. TorrentFreak contacted BREIN director Tim Kuik for a response to the news but we haven’t heard back from him at time of publication.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay remains the most popular BitTorrent site in The Netherlands where the site is listed in the top 50 of most visited sites on the Internet, beating Microsoft’s search engine Bing.com.

Just keeping you up to date on this saga.