Pirate Update

Pirate update: No, not the Somalis, the Dutch.

According to a report in IP360 (and the Associated Press), a Dutch court has given Pirate Bay 10 days to walk the plank – errr, to shut down operations in the Netherlands. And if they don’t? There are sharks waiting for them in the churning sea below, to the tune of up to $42,000 per day. Ouch! It is not clear from either report how the Court proposes to enforce its order or to block Netherlands-based traffic (one envisions a little Dutch boy, with his finger in the Internet dyke), but that’s what the Court has said and they seem to mean business.

The ruling, by the way, follows the copyright infringement suit filed just over a week ago by a number of studios (a baker’s dozen, all of whom have the dough to do so). Pirate Bay has continued to operate notwithstanding a ruling last April from a Swedish court which sent the site's founders to jail (for one year each), and hit them with a hefty $3.6 million fine based on similar charges.

How is it that Pirate Bay gets him with infringement suits (and, ahem, jail time) when YouTube hosts plenty of material that may well be covered by third party copyrights? Because unlike YouTube, Pirate Bay distributes torrent files, linking users to the copyrighted material. It is the users who host the torrents and who are in possession of any infringing material.

Thus, by seeking to circumvent claims of domestic and international copyright infringement, the Pirate walks the plank, while YouTube . . . . walks to the bank.


Jonathan Pink litigates copyright actions around the globe. He is Co-Leader of the Internet and New Media Team at Bryan Cave, LLP. Bryan Cave is an international law firm with more than 1200 attorneys world wide.