On October 22, an Amsterdam court ruled that, within three months, The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works (I thought the Dutch were supposed to be liberal?). According to TorrentFreak, “The list is to be provided by BREIN,” who is the “joint anti-piracy program of authors, artists and producers of music, film and interactive software” in the Netherlands. If owners of The Pirate Bay -- Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm -- fail to comply, they will be fined 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day. Additionally, the court said the Swedish pirates “have to block Dutch users from accessing certain parts of the site (across all their domains) where users can download copyrighted files.”
The case was notable for the defendants’ claim that they “were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles based company named Reservella.” Despite this act of bravado, the court dismissed the assertion since the Swedes did not have sufficient proof that The Pirate Bay had been acquired by this organization. However, Peter Sunde continues to argue that the site was “given away for free” in 2006 to an unknown entity, who then sold it to Reservella. Interestingly, Ars Technica says it was given anonymous information on Reservella, the name of which is “alleged to come from a Seychelles luxury hotel called ‘La Reserve.’” The company is supposedly registered with the Mayfair Trust Group Limited in the Seychelles city of Victoria.
Holy crap, this is starting to sound like a fucking James Bond film. However, the question on self-righteous TMT readers’ lips is: Should we start hating the luxury hotel industry now in addition to the major labels and anti-piracy outfits? This Pirate Bay thing is not making it easy to channel my smug indignation.