If you've been following the Pirate Bay drama, you know that this site will never be what it used to be. However, amidst all that hubbub and even after the (so far) unsuccessful sale of the site, the actual site remained operational.

Thus, many users who were there just for the torrents perhaps didn't even notice that something is wrong. This is about to change. TorrentFreak reports that the Amsterdam court ruled that The Pirate Bay must remove all copyrighted torrents from the site within three months. The Dutch court initially ruled that Pirate Bay must block access to Dutch citizens; a decision which the site's founders decided to appeal. It worked to some extent, as that judgment has now been nullified, but the Court now decided that The Pirate Bay - while not guilty of copyright infringement - is guilty of assisting copyright infringement, a phrase we hear a lot in cases such as this one.

Now, Dutch anti-piracy body BREIN will supply a list of copyrighted works to The Pirate Bay, and the operators of the site must remove them within three months, facing a fine of $7,500 per person, per day.

The problem with this decision is the fact that The Pirate Bay has always refused to admit any guilt of copyright infringement and has probably never had plans to devise a system for removing copyrighted works from its servers. With a bunch of lawsuits looming over the founders, they'll probably have to comply with BREIN's requests and stop users from uploading new torrents whatsoever. It may be just one country (Netherlands), and the Pirate Bay can choose to appeal this decision, too, but the lawsuits are piling up. Although The Pirate Bay founders always claimed that the site can live on without them, in the end simply shutting it down might be the least painful route for everyone.