dutch court

Slashdot points us to the news of a somewhat surprising ruling out of the Netherlands.

Apparently, a Dutch court has ruled that hacking into an encrypted WiFi router to use the connection is legal.

I'll have to remember that next time I'm searching for WiFi in the Netherlands.

Mininova, once the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has paid a settlement fee to Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN to end the legal clash between the two parties.

In return, BREIN dropped the damages claim they were preparing and Mininova has withdrawn their appeal, making it impossible for the site to return to full swing.

After operating for almost five full years, the BitTorrent giant Mininova deleted over a million torrent files from its site during November last year.

The long-running battle between anti-piracy group BREIN and a Usenet community reached a Dutch court room this week.

For their part, the FTD newsgroup portal wants the courts to issue a declaration that they operate legally.

On the other hand, BREIN insists that publishing the locations of copyright material is illegal and tantamount to directly publishing it.

A Dutch court has ruled that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don't have block customer access to The Pirate Bay.

According to the court, there is no evidence that the majority of the ISPs' users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.

Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been successful in court against the alleged operators of The Pirate Bay, but despite several court orders the site is still accessible to the public.

We've seen numerous bad court rulings in the Netherlands when it comes to attacks on file sharing programs, and one of the big concerns was the seemingly all-too-close relationship between the anti-piracy organization BREIN and Dutch law enforcement.

For example, it's still unclear how BREIN ended up with computer equipment from some of these file sharing operations.

Police can confiscate equipment. Private industry groups cannot.

It's still amazing that any court thinks that just publishing links to something should be illegal, but it seems to happen again and again.

Over in the Netherlands, usenet community FTD, has lost a case filed by a movie studio, because some of its users pointed out links where you could download a certain movie.

FTD didn't host the movie.

In an ongoing legal battle with MPAA-represented movie studios, a Californian court has now proposed a permanent injunction that would require isoHunt to maintain a list of banned keywords and remove torrents that match items found on it.

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