On November 1, Odido, the Netherlands’ largest mobile broadband access and TV service provider, was ordered by the Rotterdam District Court to block TorrentGalaxy, an illegal Bit Torrent Web site; which the court had determined to infringe copyright “on a large scale.” The blockade had been requested by the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN.
According to BREIN, TorrentGalaxy will be blocked by the Dutch access providers in accordance with the covenant blocking websites. This involves a dynamic blocking of its domain names, the IP address and proxies and mirrors.
Odido countered BREIN’s initial blocking request by asking BREIN to act against foreign hosting providers before acting against domistic ones. The judge in the case disagreed.
Odido is a joint venture of Warburg Pincus and Apax Partners, which acquired assets of T-Mobile Netherlands, including Tele2 Netherlands, which operates broadband Internet, fixed and mobile telephone and digital TV services.
Strichting BREIN is an active advocate against piracy that affects the Netherlands. According to its news release, BREIN has had more than 2,000 unique domains blocked over the past six years. The majority of those domains are unblocked after illegal activity ceases. At the time of BREIN’s statement, more than 500 domains were blocked. These are main domains and proxies and mirrors of clearly illegal services that have been ordered blocked by a judge. IP addresses are also included in the block.
Further reading
Odido ordered to block TorrentGalaxy. Press release. November 12, 2024. Strichting BREIN
Why it matters
“The covenant to block websites works satisfactorily. The dynamic blocking is effective and leads to a large decrease in visits from the Netherlands to the blocked, clearly illegal websites. Google also removes all websites that the Dutch access providers have to block by order of the court from the search results at the request of Stichting BREIN. This is a win-win situation,” says Bastiaan van Ramshorst, director of Stichting BREIN.
