Stichting Brein, a Dutch organization that fights against Intellectual Property theft, has managed to shut down twelve illegal websites in the United States,  in cooperation with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). BREINs latest action targets torrent sites that structurally link to copyright infringing content. (...)

This announcement follows BREIN and MPAAs joint actions in December last year, when they closed down 29 sites in the US that have published links to movie streams.

BREIN contacts the hosting provider of a targeted site, informing them that the pages show illegal content, according to information from the MPAA. In principle, BREIN will contact to the illegal sites themselves initially, but when they operate anonymously and / or do not comply with the request, they summon the hosting provider to make the pages inaccessible. If necessary, a provider receives a subpoena.

In some cases BREIN is not able to force a site to go offline. They will then proceed to contact Dutch access providers, convincing them of blocking Dutch consumers’ access to a page. BREIN is currently involved in a court procedure to get this done.

This approach has so far been very successful. Last year, BREIN was able to make 665 sites and servers inaccessible. Besides the Netherlands and the U.S., BREIN was also successful in Germany, France, Britain, Luxembourg, Denmark, Canada, Lithuania, Hungary, Ukraine, Israel and Malaysia. "There will be new sites, but if we get them down fast, they can not grow big, " says BREIN director Tim Kuik. "Our goal is to hinder access to illegal sites, so that users will start to prefer legitimate platforms for sharing music and videos." Kuik does not publish names of the websites they target.

Source:  BREIN