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

Written on July 14, 2008 – 6:24 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

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.

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brein, The Netherlands, torrent

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Torrent site Mininova breaks the 5 billion downloads barrier

Written on May 27, 2008 – 1:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

In January 2005, three young Dutch guys started a new torrent site as an alternative to SuprNova, the former popular torrent service that couldn’t cope with the legal pressure. Yesterday, these guys celebrated the fifth billion download.

Mininova has been growing with an incredible speed. Last November they reached the third billion download, 78 days later they counted four billion downloads and now another billion milestone has been reached. TorrentFreak reported that when Mininova went offline due to hardware problems a couple of weeks ago, its competitors Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent almost went down as well. They couldn’t handle the traffic of the Mininova refugees. Impressive stuff..

But it isn’t all party hearty at Mininova’s HQ, as Eric, Matthijs, and Niek face a lawsuit by the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN. This organization wants Mininova to be history, since they think 90 percent of the files on Mininova are illegal. Mininova’s counter plead? We’re not afraid as we’re just like Google, only referring to other sites. This isn’t just youthful recklessness, since Bright reports Mininova has hired lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, the same guy who won the Dutch lawsuit against Kazaa. Exactly the track record Eric, Matthijs and Niek need.

brein, lawsuit, mininova, torrents

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