Will it be the end of illegal file sharing with the Dutch Court Decision?
This is in furtherance of our previous post related to the pirate bay decision. Let us contemplate a little further…
First the Swedish court decision in 2009 and now the decision of the Dutch court on January 11, 2012, appears as though the courts are adamant on removing illegal online file sharing! As stated in our earlier post, two Dutch internet service providers Ziggo and XS4ALL have been ordered by the Dutch court to block their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay within ten days or as a consequence face fine of Euro 10,000 per day. Whether the courts will be successful in their resolution or not that will be known as the time passes but one thing is for certain that the decisions of the courts in this regard have brought certain uproar in the world of piracy.
The Pirate Bay as has been in legal trouble for years faced one of its biggest legal blow in 2009 when three of its owners and a businessman who sold services to the site were sentenced to jail for a year and were ordered to pay large penalty of $3.6 million for infringing the copyrights. In the same year, an Amsterdam court ordered The Pirate Bay itself to block traffic to Netherlands, but that proved unenforceable since the site is hosted outside the country. The recent decision of the Dutch court blocking The Pirate Bay has increased the problems for the site. But the major question before us is whether such vital decisions by the courts mean the end of illegal file sharing?
It comes as a reminder to the users no doubt, that internet is not free from legal threat. Internet users will find it more difficult to access the Pirate Bay site, which could lead to a drop in internet traffic, as Pirate Bay is one of the world’s most popular websites. But surely the illegal sharing of files on the internet will not go down. Plenty of other new file sharing sites hosting pirated copyrighted content are waiting to come up. Thus removing pirate bay from the internet will have very little impact on the illegal file sharing.
Author: Soumya Pandey
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Thanks. Informative and insightful post. Please add more post on the international IP news.