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The ; abbreviated as ) is an
advocacy group Advocacy groups, also known as lobby groups, interest groups, special interest groups, pressure groups, or public associations, use various forms of advocacy or lobbying to influence public opinion and ultimately public policy. They play an impor ...
with international links, based in the
Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
, which represents the interests of the Dutch
entertainment industry Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and Interest (emotion), interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but it is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have deve ...
and is organised under the Dutch law through the legal form of ''
stichting A () is a Dutch legal entity with limited liability, not aiming to make profit, with no members or share capital, that exists for a specific purpose that is serving a public, social or an idealistic interest. A stichting is allowed to make profit ...
''. It is notable for launching court proceedings against
copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of Copyright#Scope, works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the c ...
in the country and for engaging in
lobbying Lobbying is a form of advocacy, which lawfully attempts to directly influence legislators or government officials, such as regulatory agency, regulatory agencies or judiciary. Lobbying involves direct, face-to-face contact and is carried out by va ...
in order to create legal
precedents Precedent is a judicial decision that serves as an authority for courts when deciding subsequent identical or similar cases. Fundamental to common law legal systems, precedent operates under the principle of ''stare decisis'' ("to stand by thin ...
of global significance.


Participants

BREIN brings together organizations or rights holders in the entertainment industry, such as film and recording studios. Those are amongst others: *
Buma/Stemra BUMA/STEMRA are two private organisations in the Netherlands, the Buma Association (Dutch language, Dutch: ''Vereniging Buma'') and the Stemra Foundation (Dutch language, Dutch: ''Stichting Stemra'') that operate as one single company that acts as ...
*
Nederlandse Vereniging van Producenten en Importeurs van Beeld- en Geluidsdragers NVPI (Nederlandse Vereniging van Producenten en Importeurs van beeld- en geluidsdragers) () is the Dutch trade association of the entertainment industry. The NVPI represents most of the Dutch record companies, video distributors, and game-softwa ...
* Motion Pictures Association * Nederlandse Vereniging van Filmdistributeurs * Bridge Entertainment Group B.V. * Nederlandse Vereniging van Bioscoopexploitanten * Stichting Videma * Nederlandse Vereniging van Entertainment Retailers * Nederlandse Uitgeversverbond * members of the
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a non-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland and founded in Italy in 1 ...


History

Tim (Timotheus Jacobus) Kuik, a law graduate of the
University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, ) is a public university, public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Established in 1632 by municipal authorities, it is the fourth-oldest academic institution in the Netherlan ...
(1982), oversaw the activities of BREIN from its inception. He assumed leadership of BREIN in 1999 after returning to his native
Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
from
Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
, where he had headed the
Motion Picture Association The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the Major film studios, five major film studios of the Cinema of the United States, United States, the Major film studios#Mini-majors, mini-major Amazon MGM Stud ...
's global anti-piracy programme from 1996. He had originally worked for
CIC Video CIC Video was a home video distributor, established in 1980, owned by Cinema International Corporation (the forerunner of United International Pictures), and operated in some countries (such as United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Japan, France, Ge ...
, a joint venture between
Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures Corporation, commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film production company, production and Distribution (marketing), distribution company and the flagship namesake subsidiary of Paramount ...
and
Universal Pictures Universal City Studios LLC, doing business as Universal Pictures (also known as Universal Studios or simply Universal), is an American filmmaking, film production and film distribution, distribution company headquartered at the 10 Universal Ci ...
which represented a change in policy from attempts to ban
VHS VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, introduced in 1976 by JVC. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s. Ma ...
, and led MPA's anti-piracy activities in Europe from 1992, which included interventions in
Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...
and
Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...
. Before leaving Los Angeles, on 21 February 1998 he presented a paper titled ''How the East Was Won: Legal Aspects of the Entertainment Business in Russia'' at a conference there. By the time of its publication in summer 1999 under the changed title ''Piracy in Russia: An Epidemic'', Kuik was listed as the General Director of BREIN. On 30 July 2009, an Amsterdam civil law court ruled in favour of BREIN in its lawsuit over copyright infringement against the three alleged operators of
The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...
(TPB), who were not officially summoned by the court. In August 2009, Kuik addressed the Hacking at Random conference on the future of copyright laws and was confronted by TPB's founder Gottfrid Svartholm over his allegations that TPB is run for profit. Kuik was unable to substantiate his claims. In October 2012, BREIN won a landmark case in
The Hague The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...
against the Dutch hosting service provider XS Networks, which had refused to shut down a
torrent Torrent or torrents may refer to: * A fast flowing stream Animals * Torrent duck, a species of the family Anatidae * Torrent fish * Torrent frog, various unrelated frogs * Torrent robin, a bird species * Torrent salamander, a family of ...
-based
file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...
site at BREIN's request and hand over the personal details of its owner to BREIN. The court found XS Network liable for damages for copyright infringement and ordered it to disclose information about the site owner. The ruling was seen as a precedent in that it held hosting providers legally responsible for not complying with requests of industry interest groups in advance of a court order. In October 2020, BREIN won its ten-year-long lawsuit against three
internet service providers An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non ...
(ISPs) –
Ziggo Ziggo Holding B.V. ( ) is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, providing digital cable television, Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers. History The company is the result of the merger between ...
,
KPN Koninklijke KPN N.V. (Royal KPN N.V. in English), trading as KPN is a Dutch List of telephone operating companies, telecommunications company. KPN originated from a government-run postal, telegraph and telephone service and is based in Rotterda ...
and
XS4ALL XS4ALL was an Internet service provider (ISP) in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1993 as an offshoot of the Hacker (computer security), hackers club Hack-Tic by Felipe Rodriquez, Rop Gonggrijp, Paul Jongsma and Cor Bosman, while based in Amster ...
– when a
Lelystad Lelystad () is a Dutch Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and the capital city of the province of Flevoland in the central Netherlands. The city, built on reclaimed land, was founded in 1967 and was named after Cornelis Lely, who en ...
court ordered the ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. In March 2021, the BREIN employee Bastiaan van Ramshorst sent a copy of the blocking order against TPB to
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
, although the company had not been named in it. In November 2021, BREIN and the Dutch Copyright Federation concluded an official
covenant Covenant may refer to: Religion * Covenant (religion), a formal alliance or agreement made by God with a religious community or with humanity in general ** Covenant (biblical), in the Hebrew Bible ** Covenant in Mormonism, a sacred agreement b ...
-type agreement with six ISPs (Ziggo, KPN, Delta Fiber,
T-Mobile T-Mobile is the brand of telecommunications by Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (, ; often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a partially state-owned German telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn and the largest telec ...
,
Canal+ Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flo ...
and NLConnect), negotiated with the support of the Dutch
Ministry of Justice and Security The Ministry of Justice and Security (; JenV) is the Dutch ministry responsible for justice, imprisonment and public security. The ministry was created in 1798 as the ''Department of Justice'', before it became in 1876 the ''Ministry of Justice' ...
, in which all the participating operators agreed to block a website if one of them received a blocking order against it. BREIN was charged with updating the
domain A domain is a geographic area controlled by a single person or organization. Domain may also refer to: Law and human geography * Demesne, in English common law and other Medieval European contexts, lands directly managed by their holder rather ...
lists of blocked websites, while the ISPs agreed to bear technical costs of enforcing the blocks. By November 2021 Google voluntarily complied with enforcing the block against TPB, an action that was reported to be unprecedented on its part. BREIN claimed that Google found itself in "the same situation" as the Dutch ISPs who had signed the recent covenant. BREIN subsequently reported further collaboration with Google entailing removing blocked domains from local search results. In March 2024, BREIN obtained a court order from the Rotterdam District Court for a Dutch ISP to block the
Library Genesis Library Genesis (shortened to LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content th ...
and
Anna's Archive Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow library, shadow libraries that was launched by Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to Z-Library#United States, shut down Z-Library in 2022. The site aggregates records from major ...
shadow libraries, thus expanding the existing blocklist under the 2021 covenant. The court issued a dynamic blocking order covering all future domains. In April 2024, Kuik retired and was replaced by Bastiaan van Ramshorst, a business law graduate (2000) and a member of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property, who joined BREIN around 2010 and whom Kuik had prepared as his successor over the previous ten years. In an interview given on the occasion of his retirement, Kuik admitted that the business model behind
Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...
,
Spotify Spotify (; ) is a List of companies of Sweden, Swedish Music streaming service, audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. , it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services ...
and
Napster Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...
largely derives from the copyright-infringing
streaming Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downl ...
services BREIN has sought to close down.


Shutdowns of alleged piracy sites

BREIN is known for shutting down Dutch eDonkey 2000 link giant ShareConnector in December 2004. Due to controversy over the legality of links to illegal content, and a lack of quality in the evidence provided by BREIN, the case was not put to trial for several years. After being offline for two years, ShareConnector reopened in December 2006 but on November 12, 2007, Shareconnector went offline again. On March 16, 2010 the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ruled that sites that offer hash links (like .torrent links) were facilitating copyright infringement, an unlawful behavior. Shareconnector did not make the content available to the public because they did not have control over the content itself and they did not interfere in the up- and downloading process. However, the Court of Appeal ruled that the site was illegal because their procedure made it easier for users to retrieve the illegal content from the eDonkey network. On October 23, 2007 BREIN, together with
IFPI The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a non-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland and founded in Italy in 1 ...
, BPI, Dutch police, and other organizations shut down prominent
Bittorrent tracker A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. In peer-to-peer file sharing, a software client on an end-user PC requests a file, and portions of the requested ...
Oink's Pink Palace Oink's Pink Palace (frequently stylized as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonog ...
. In a civil court case which BREIN filed in the Netherlands against the founders of The Pirate Bay, on 22 October 2009 the Amsterdam District Court ruled that The Pirate Bay was not making a direct infringement but its facilitating activities amount to an unlawful act. The Court ordered The Pirate Bay to remove a list of torrents that link to copyright-protected works in the Netherlands and to make these torrents on its websites inaccessible for Internet users in the Netherlands. The Pirate Bay ignored the verdict. In January 2012, BREIN announced that a Dutch court had ordered
Ziggo Ziggo Holding B.V. ( ) is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, providing digital cable television, Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers. History The company is the result of the merger between ...
and
XS4ALL XS4ALL was an Internet service provider (ISP) in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1993 as an offshoot of the Hacker (computer security), hackers club Hack-Tic by Felipe Rodriquez, Rop Gonggrijp, Paul Jongsma and Cor Bosman, while based in Amster ...
to block all access to
The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...
. On May 10, 2012 this judgement was followed by a court order of the District Court in The Hague against UPC, KPN, T-Mobile and Tele2 to also block The Pirate Bay for their customers.
Ziggo Ziggo Holding B.V. ( ) is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, providing digital cable television, Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers. History The company is the result of the merger between ...
and
XS4ALL XS4ALL was an Internet service provider (ISP) in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1993 as an offshoot of the Hacker (computer security), hackers club Hack-Tic by Felipe Rodriquez, Rop Gonggrijp, Paul Jongsma and Cor Bosman, while based in Amster ...
appealed this verdict and won, with BREIN being ordered to pay 326,000 Euro as a compensation for process costs. On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include
Anna's Archive Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow library, shadow libraries that was launched by Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to Z-Library#United States, shut down Z-Library in 2022. The site aggregates records from major ...
and
Library Genesis Library Genesis (shortened to LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content th ...
, based on a request by BREIN.


Lawsuit by FTD

After a series of allegations that Usenet community Fill Threads Database (FTD) was acting illegally, the Dutch FTD started a lawsuit against BREIN in May 2009. BREIN president Tim Kuik alleged in a Dutch newspaper that "Although they TDare not carrying illegal content on their servers, what FTD does is simply criminal". FTD is suing for a retraction of this libelous statement and demands a declaration from the courts that its activities are entirely within the law. On February 9, 2011, the Dutch District Court of Haarlem ruled, that FTD had acted unlawfully and issued an injunction. FTD was obliged to ban all references to files of BREIN members. The court also ruled that Tim Kuik was free to expose the conduct of FTD and communicate the opinion of BREIN. The request for rectification was therefore rejected by the court. FTD ceased all its operations a few weeks after the verdict.


Alleged attack on BREIN website

On 1 June 2009, Tim Kuik published an online article claiming BREIN's website was "broken" by hackers performing DDoS attacks. He speculated about a possible connection with the intended court summons against The Pirate Bay. Several independent sources reported the site's deep links were still available (only the frontpage was inaccessible) and as such BREIN's claim of having been attacked was false. Brein responded claiming the attacks had stopped and that the site's year old backup had been used to recover the site. Because the backup was dated, the website was now under construction. Internet blog Geenstijl purportedly discovered BREIN's server was still fully operational and there had been no attack whatsoever - the complete news archive was still available. (A password was later added to BREIN's news archive to prevent further checks on availability.) On 23 June 2009, The Pirate Bay announced a lawsuit against Tim Kuik on libel charges, claiming The Pirate Bay had nothing to do with the alleged DDoS attack.


Criticism

In September 2009, BREIN CEO Tim Kuik attracted controversy when in a news conference he stated he was using a laptop confiscated from a "pirate" and given to him by someone involved with the case. BREIN attracted controversy again when several suspicious aspects of their lawsuit against The Pirate Bay and Reservella were revealed, including evidence that documents used to link Fredrik Neij of The Pirate Bay to Reservella were faked. Peter Sunde and the Dutch Pirate Party filed criminal felony charges against both Tim Kuik and BREIN for fraud and forgery. In January 2011, BREIN targeted one of the Internet's largest
warez Warez refers to pirated software and other copyrighted digital media—such as video games, movies, music, and e-books—illegally distributed online, often after bypassing digital rights management (DRM). The term, derived from “software wa ...
piracy topsites. The site, known as Swan, was taken down by hosting provider WorldStream and without judicial process BREIN seized its servers. The owners of the servers retaliated by seizing them back and may sue BREIN for breach of privacy and property rights as BREIN is a private organization and has no special legal or investigative authority.


References


Bibliography

* *


External links

* {{Official website, http://www.anti-piracy.nl/ Entertainment industry associations Trade associations based in the Netherlands Organisations based in North Holland Haarlemmermeer Anti-piracy