{"id":40107,"date":"2017-07-03T01:34:43","date_gmt":"2017-07-02T20:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/one\/?p=40107"},"modified":"2025-06-13T15:25:26","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T09:55:26","slug":"the-pirate-bay-eu-court-copyright-infringement-block","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/the-pirate-bay-eu-court-copyright-infringement-block\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pirate Bay to be Blocked, EU Court Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden<\/em> or the Supreme Court of Netherland pronounced an important ruling in a seven-year-long legal altercation, involving the infamous file sharing platform Pirate Bay.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this case, two internet access providers (IASs), Ziggo and XS4ALL, has subscribers who were using the platform Pirate Bay to upload and share several copyrighted works. Such sharing and uploading being completely unauthorized by the respective right holders. The proceedings were brought before the Court by Stichting Brein<\/em>, an organization which works towards protecting and defending the rights of copyright holders. The organization sought an order which would require the aforementioned IASs to block domain names and IP addresses of Pirate Bay.<\/span><\/p>\n

While deciding the case the primary argument was whether Pirate Bay\u2019s acts amounted to \u2018communication to the public\u2019 with respect to the EU Directive (Article 3(1) of Directive 2001\/29\/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001) and therefore were infringing in nature. The Court discussed that the taking into consideration the judgement in Stichting Brein<\/em> (C\u2011527\/15, EU:C:2017:300, paragraph 36) the \u201cact of communication\u201d can be sufficiently proved if the works are made available in such a way to the public that they can access the works anywhere, anytime as they may individually desire, irrespective of the fact that they may actually avail such an opportunity.\u00a0 Moreover, considering case law such as Svensson and others<\/em>, Bestwater International<\/em> and GS Media<\/em> it has been held that by providing clickable links to copyrighted works on a website, without any restrictions to access on such a website, allows the users of the of the first site direct access to those works.<\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, considering the foregoing case law, Court stated that as a rule if a user, that if a platform with full knowledge of the relevant facts gives access to protected works to its clients, it would qualify as communication to the public with respect to the EU Directive.<\/span>
\nPirate Bay argued that it did not host infringing files or provide links to them, but hosted \u201ctrackers\u201d files which basically connected users of individual BitTorrent app user to other users, who were sharing or making available the file(s) that they may be seeking. Secondly, these trackers files were not created by Pirate Bay, but were merely hosted by them and therefore the safe harbor provisions must be applicable to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Court, however, observed that the although the copyrighted works were put online by the users the role played by the operators of Pirate Bay cannot be overlooked.\u00a0 Firstly, they index the files in such a manner that the works to which they refer to are easily discoverable. Secondly, besides providing a search engine the works are also divided based on their genre or popularity etc. Thirdly, the operators also actively filtered the content and deleted any faulty torrents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, the Court highlighted that the operators have on several blogs and forums made known their intentions by stating that they intend to make available copyrighted works and encourage their users to make copies of the same. This makes apparent that the operators were undeniably in the know of the nature of the works made available through their platform, without authorization. Lastly, the Court noted that platform made significant advertisement revenues and carried out for the purposes of profit.<\/span><\/p>\n

With respect to communication to the public, the Court stated that to stratify this requirement, there should actually be communication to a \u2018public\u2019.\u00a0 To prove this a certain de minimus<\/em> criteria has to be fulfilled. Moreover, the Court stated that \u201cit is necessary to know not only how many persons have access to the same work at the same time, but also how many of them have access to it in succession\u201d. In the present case, the Court noted that the works were made accessible to a considerable number of users, the number going in millions. These users were able to access anytime and simultaneously copyrighted works which were shared by means of Pirate Bay.<\/span><\/p>\n

Considering the aforementioned reasoning the Court ruled against Pirate Bay.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court of Netherlands has ruled that The Pirate Bay enables copyright infringement under EU law. Internet service providers are now required to block access to the platform, highlighting the legal obligations of intermediaries regarding unauthorized sharing of copyrighted works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,7],"tags":[8386,31,8099,8655,8656,8654,8653,8652],"class_list":["post-40107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyrights","category-intellectual-property","category-media-and-entertainment-law","tag-communication-to-the-public","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-eu-court","tag-eu-directive","tag-file-sharing-platforms","tag-internet-service-providers","tag-stichting-brein","tag-the-pirate-bay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40107"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135903,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40107\/revisions\/135903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}