Or perhaps they're listening to tunes in a smoking bar...
Vis: http://www.geek.com/articles/news/dutch-anti-piracy-group-brein-caught-stealing-music-2011122/
A Dutch court has ordered two popular ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, or face fines of €10,000 a day. The case was brought by Dutch anti-piracy coalition BREIN. The case dates back to a 2009 court decision to block access to the Swedish-founded site. Court-ordered blocks are becoming almost routine. On Monday a …
After suffering an (IMO) devastating failure BREIN is now simply revealing their true nature; an organization (funded by the government) which tries to enforce censorship and obviously has no problems with violating Dutch laws.
The failure part should be obvious; the head honcho himself has traveled several times up and down to Sweden to "investigate" Piratebay. Personally I came to conclude that the longer this "fued" continued the more did it began to look like a personal crusade. Piratebay was portrait as a "source of evil" and they were going to get them. That was over 3 years ago. Needless to say but the whole scheme failed; despite many "brave" (sic) attempts Piratebay kept going strong. One can only wonder how much tax money has been wasted on all this.
So here we are now. Instead of taking responsibility for their own failures BREIN simply continues to hunt windmills. Since they can't succeed in stopping the "offenders" they now resort to enforcing two Dutch ISP's to block their customers from these "offenders". The whole thing is a joke really; the Judge has basically ordered that XS4All and Ziggo (ISP's) should 3 IP addresses and 24 domains. BREIN also has the right to supply newly discovered addresses which should then also be blocked.
This is a rather odd decision by the court because under Dutch law we are allowed to freely download material from the Internet. It becomes an issue when people are providing (illegal) material.
Alas; needless to say that this is all a moot issue considering how the Piratebay basically provides .torrent files which are also kept by a dozen other websites. Or to put this differently; while many people will be sorry to see them "go" (there are also zillions of ways to overcome all this) in the end they won't really be missed.
So concluding; another epic failure. This accomplishes nothing apart from wasting a lot of the taxpayers money. And in the end absolutely nothing will change when it comes to the availability of "illegal" material.
"The UK government has said it won't implement measures to block access to websites that are now on the statute book"
I disagree with this. Simply by the fact that censorship is already common place in most* ISPs in the UK for both sites on the secret IWF list which just keeps getting bigger and bigger with sites other than its original purpose of blocking pedo sites and sites like Newsbin, at the behest of a foreign, to the UK government and people, copyright holder.
The benefit to the UK tax paying public for all of this? You tell me.
* The IWF list is of course "voluntary", but all major ISPs use it.
appear to have received a bomb threat from Anonymous according to YLE (http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/news/2012/01/police_investigate_anti-piracy_group_bomb_threat_3165279.html)
If nothing else, this sort of activity keeps us entertained as the entertainment industry screams about piracy, the ISPs shout about freedom and unreasonable cost and the freetards throw temper tantrums.
Comes from having a second-best navy. History forgotten, repeated etc. ;)
Actually, I'm all for this from a conceptual point of view (I know nothing of the status of Dutch law), insofar as countries should be free to pass their own laws and should only seek to implement them within their own borders.
It is actually good to have a little competition between countries' legal systems - it indicates that self-determination is alive and well, which is the whole point of having democracy.
This may be relevant
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/eu-court-of-justice-censorship-in-name-of-copyright-violates-fundamental-rights
Meanwhile in the land of the free (sic) these sites are considered worth bypassing the SOPA restrictions.
http://griftastic.com/soapysites.html
Of course then theres ACTA in the wings, plus the passing of info to third parties without permission.
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The judge in this case has made massive errors. first up, the "facts" provided by the Dutch anti-piracy coalition BREIN, turned out to be incorrect and the judge apparently didn't feel the need to check those numbers (wonder why on earth this person is a judge, but that's offtopic).
second, there's already been a European ruling in exactly the same case, if the Dutch ISPs take it to Europe, there wont even be a case, the previous verdict will be dug up and applied.
thirdly, this verdict shows that the justice department still doesn't really understand how the internet works, how are they going to enforce this? for every ten piratebays you block, 100 will be waiting in tow to fill the gap.
This whole case is wrong in so many ways, it's actually quite amusing.
Xs4all has already announced the will appeal this decision. For those of you able to read dutch:
https://blog.xs4all.nl/2012/01/11/persbericht-rechter-beveelt-website-te-blokkeren-xs4all-in-hoger-beroep/ and http://tweakers.net/nieuws/79292/xs4all-gaat-in-hoger-beroep-tegen-pirate-bay-blokkade.html