A Dutch court has ordered the Pirate Bay to prevent access to users from that country or face penalties, in a ruling maintaining a previous judgment. The three founders of the file sharing site were sued last year in The Netherlands by the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The group argued that the Pirate Bay fostered copyright infringement and had to be stopped.

The latest decision comes after a full trial and an appeal and the court is now asking the site to shut down in the country and the three founders will have to pay penalties of 50,000 Euros per day as long as the site is still up.

After the Pirate Bay had famously lost the case brought against it in Sweden, BREIN asked the court in The Netherlands to block the site. The court initially agreed and gave the founders 10 days to comply. None of them had shown up during the trial and later said they were unaware of it.

They were finally allowed to appeal the decision and did so, hiring a lawyer in the country. The court again told the Pirate Bay that it had to remove a number of torrents linking to copyrighted files in the initial appeal ruling, but didn’t say the site had to be shut down. Now, after the full trial, the Amsterdam Court maintained the ruling and set the new penalties for not complying.

The founders again didn’t show up for the court hearings or hire legal representation. The three claim they have not been the owners of the Pirate Bay since 2006 and have said that the site is owned by a company in the Seychelles. However, they didn’t provide any documents to back up their claims.

The court found that, while the site itself was not infringing, it was encouraging and helping others to do so. It has now ordered the three founders to block access in the country. Based on previous actions, this is unlikely to happen. [via TorrentFreak]