The folks running the Pirate Bay, whoever they may be, never seemed particularly interested in entertaining BREIN’s court summons. The Dutch copyright enforcers, better known as BREIN, have been trying to force The Pirate Bay out of the Netherlands since June of this year. This is nothing new for BREIN, as they have been fierce in their attempts to reverse the stigma that the Netherlands is a haven for BitTorrent trackers aiding in the unauthorized distribution of content.

In June of this year, BREIN sent a summons to the administrators of The Pirate Bay via Twitter and Facebook, claiming that it was impossible to track them down in person. Their demand: remove all torrents that point to infringing content. Over the course of several months, the three administrators (or ex-administrators, depending on who you believe) never showed up. There never seemed to be much point anyway – their defense tried to argue that they no longer own the site, but BREIN and the courts didn’t buy it.

On October 22, the court finally ruled that The Pirate Bay must remove all access to torrents that potentially refer to infringing material (but could keep the site online). A few weeks later, The Pirate Bay shut their trackers down. However, the site is far from dead. Instead of tracking swarms, the site has magnet links and a torrent index (but does not track them). Most of the links available previously are still accessible, only the technology pointing the end user to the P2P swarms has changed.

According to BREIN today, The Pirate Bay isn’t appealing the October 22nd ruling. Maybe that’s because they feel that by removing their torrent tracker, they have already complied with the ruling. But the big question remains, is BREIN satisfied with The Pirate Bay’s efforts? We doubt it, so we’ve followed up with BREIN, and will hopefully have a response soon.

Tim Kuik, the Director of BREIN, responded to our inquiry, and it seems that come March 2010, The Pirate Bay won't be off the hook by merely switching to magnet links.

"...it does not matter at all whether the links are magnet or whatever. What matters is whether they go to illegal content or not. The links, by whatever name or technology, may not refer to illegal content. It's not the technology, it's what it is used for."

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