Another Dutch web host prosecuted for torrent website, end of one more torrent safe haven?

Written on 14th July 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Another Dutch host has been challenged in court to hand over personal information of a torrent website. The accusing party claimes that host Euroaccess facilitated violations of copyrights on the internet, and that the site torrents.to, has an illegal character and should have been taken down by the host. The outcome of the case is a big step for the anti-piracy organizations and it seems that this witch hunt is only just beginning.

The host was recently brought to court by Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, arguing that torrents.to was facilitating copyright infringement. The judge claims that the illegal activities of torrents.to are obvious, and sentenced the host to take down the torrent site within 24 hours, and has to pay all court costs of almost 17.000 euro and has to hand over the personal data of the site’s administrator. EuroAccess reacts to ISPam.nl that the torrent site is actually hosted in the UK, and argue that the case falls outside the scope of the dutch law. However, BREIN claims that the server had been pinpointed to be in the Netherlands, and was trusted by the judge for that matter.

For now, EuroAccess reacts that they requested the UK department to put the site down, and to hand over the personal information to BREIN. Sources tell that torrent.to have moved their operations to Sweden but their website seems to be offline for now. The Netherlands has been a safe haven for torrent tracking websites until recently, but it seems that hosting companies might have to comply to BREIN’s requests in the future.