After failing to shut down The Pirate Bay, the movie industry in The Netherlands has been trying to find other ways of limiting access to the site. Earlier they began threatening an ISP with court action unless it blocked access to the site. Now one of the ISP's rivals is joining the fight against anti-piracy group BREIN in the hope of avoiding an undemocratic precedent.

Earlier this year, TorrentFreak exclusively revealed that in yet another attempt to cause damage to The Pirate Bay, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN had begun threatening an ISP.

Ziggo is the largest cable Internet provider in The Netherlands and in 2009 generated nearly 1.3 billion euros in revenue from 7.2 million Internet, TV and telephone customers. In April BREIN demanded that it stop providing customer access to The Pirate Bay via a DNS and IP address block.

Non-compliance would result in legal action under Article 6:162 of the Dutch Civil Code. Ziggo, however, refused to comply.

“There is no legal basis for this request,” said the company in an announcement. “We are just a conduit. We provide people access to the Internet and have nothing to do with that website. Moreover, we favor public Internet.”

Now it appears that Ziggo is receiving support in its fight from one of its competitors. ISP XS4ALL will join its rival in fighting the proceedings brought by BREIN.

XS4ALL says that it is against censorship and is intervening in the hope that they can help avoid a legal precedent which could have negative implications for the basic principles of the Internet. The company argues that if the case was lost, the ruling could have far-reaching consequences for both ISPs and Internet users.

While ISPs can be held responsible for material held on their own servers, generally they cannot be held responsible for the content of traffic generated by others.

“The basic principle of the Internet is that ISPs pass on traffic to their customers unfiltered, they are merely a gateway,” says Niels Huijbregts, spokesman for XS4ALL. “The Pirate Bay website is not hosted on a Ziggo server, so Ziggo can’t be held responsible for restricting access to the website. BREIN is targeting the wrong people.”

Tim Kuik, the boss of BREIN, sees things quite differently.

“This is not about censorship but about the basic principles of law which we live by,” he explained. “Democracy only works if we follow the rules, something the illegal Pirate Bay fundamentally does not. The law also states that there is no right of access to illegal websites. That is something that Ziggo and XS4ALL have overlooked.”

Christiaan Alberdingk, XS4ALL’s lawyer and partner at SOLV law firm is clear on what the ISPs are trying to avoid when the case goes to court in The Hague on June 28.

“When we start shutting down sites foreign sites in The Netherlands, that is a disproportionate restriction on our freedom to gather information. That does not fit into a democratic country like ours.”