Today the Court of The Hague (The Netherlands) did a ruling in a lawsuit started by BREIN (Dutch anti-piracy group) against hosting provider XSnetworks. The court ruled that the hosting provider acted unlawfully against BREIN regarding the evidently wrongful site Sumotorrent, by not immediately removing the website and not promptly identifying information from the owners of the site to BREIN. The hosting provider must keep the illegal website removed and is liable for the damages caused by the hosting of the site despite warnings and summations of BREIN. Also, the hosting provider must give all identifying information available to BREIN. All this on penalty of a fine of EUR 10,000 per day with a maximum of EUR 500,000.

XSnetworks was the hosting provider of a number of obvious illegal sites until February this year , of which Sumotorrent was the largest. A hosting provider gives shelter to websites and connects them to the Internet. SumoTorrent is an anonymous operating site with 4.5 million torrent links whose vast majority and most-used access to files with illegal copies of copyrighted files like movies, music, books and games.

Although XSnetworks knew that Sumotorrent is an obvious illegal site, they refused all cooperation and didn’t took adequate measures to limit the damage, such as shutting down the site and the issue of identifying information of its customers. Instead they held the site knowingly online and earned money on it. Even after XSnetworks was summoned by BREIN, they gave Sumotorrent more than enough time to transfer its business to a hosting provider in the Ukraine. Then they gave BREIN identity of its former customer which were clearly falsified and held further identifying data behind.

XSnetworks is now by court found liable for the damage caused by its wrongful refusal to cooperate. They have to reimburse the damaged caused since then by Sumotorrent to BREIN. The judge ruled that Sumotorrent is an obvious illegal site. Therefore, the professional hosting provider should have made the site inaccessible immediately and should have promptly provided all known identifying information.

Original Source (Dutch): http://anti-piracy.nl/nieuws.php?id=281