Dutch court clogs Pirate Bay

Say goodbye to the Low Countries

A Dutch court has ordered The Pirate Bay to remove itself from the Netherlands within 10 days or face fines of 30,000 euros per day.

The ban is unsurprisingly the result of a copyright lawsuit and call for action filed by the local recording industry lobby group, Stichting Brein.

A judge on Thursday ordered the three Pirate Bay administrators - Frederik Neij, Gottfried Svartholm, and Peter Sunde - to "cease infringing the copyright" of the record labels and block the website's traffic to the Netherlands.

For every day the order is ignored, The Pirate Bay will be subject to a fine of 30,000 euros (£25,590, $42,200) up to a maximum of three million euros.

According to the P2P blog TorrentFreak, the ruling came as a surprise to the three founders because they hadn't received an official summons - and weren't even aware of the case.

Because the trio weren't present at the hearing, the court issued a default judgment in Stichting Brein's favor.

But as the Associated Press points out, it's not really clear how the site will block all its traffic in and out of the the country or whether the court can even enforce a ban if The Pirate Bay declines.®