One for fans of illegal music sites. Or, rather, the closing down of illegal music sites. A Dutch website that provided torrentlinks to illegal sources of music, films and games has gone offline after officials from the country's anti-piracy group, BREIN, got heavy with the company who hosted it.
Extremepowertorrents.nl was established in response to BREIN action taken against another illegal Bittorrent service, NLExperience. It offered some 20,000 registered users access to 1500 free verified torrentlinks to copyrighted content.
The anti-piracy group had previously summoned the owners of the website and the company that hosted it, on the grounds they were violating copyrights, but had received no response. To that end they sent officials to meet with the site's hosts, and following that meeting, the hosting company issued their clients at Extremepowertorrents.nl with a cease and desist letter, an action which led to the site going offline.
Nevertheless, BREIN is now demanding compensation from the hosting company. They say that as a result of BREIN's attempts to identify the owners of the bittorrent service, the hosting firm discovered that the contact details they had for the site's owners were false. BREIN say they should have pulled the site on learning that fact, but instead did not share this information with the anti-piracy organisation for a further six weeks. BREIN wants compensation for the six week period the hosting firm allowed the illegal website to continue trading, with a figure of 280,000 euros reported.
Commenting on their action against Extremepowertorrents.nl, BREIN chief Tim Kuik told reporters yesterday: "Many pirate websites are hosted at shady hosting providers who are not very precise about complying with the law - they run a heavy risk".