Dutch Pirate Party Refuses To Shut Down Proxy Service Based On Demand From Anti-Piracy Group

from the standing-its-ground dept

Last week the local Pirate Party also received a letter from BREIN, demanding the shutdown of their Pirate Bay proxy site hosted at tpb.piratenpartij.nl. However, unlike the site owners that were previously contacted by the group, the Pirate Party is not caving in. They would rather fight the case in court. Today the Party informed BREIN that the proxy site will stay online. To show that The Pirate Bay can be a useful communication tool the Pirate Party sent the letter through a torrent file, hosted on the BitTorrent site at the center of the dispute. “The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak. “A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.”

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The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is somewhat famous for its overreaching efforts. While it succeeded in getting ISPs to block The Pirate Bay's website, it's been going after a bunch of proxy sites that have helped people get around the block. Its latest move may run into some difficulty however. The Dutch Pirate Party has its own proxy offering, and BREIN is demanding they turn it off . The Pirate Party, however, is standing its ground. As TorrentFreak reports:The larger point in all of this, of course, is just how completely and utterly useless BREIN's game of whac-a-mole is. There are so many proxy sites out there, and many are used for perfectly legitimate reasons. Trying to block every single one of them is a fool's errand. Those who want to go to TPB will figure out ways to get there.

Filed Under: anti-piracy, brein, proxy, whac-a-mole

Companies: the pirate bay