Pirate Bay-trio to sue Dutch copyright group

The suit comes after the group, BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland), sued The Pirate Bay last month in Dutch court.

Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg announced their plans to sue BREIN CEO Tim Kuik on The Pirate Bay blog on Thursday.

“We want people to be aware of all the laws that are broken by our political opponents in order to silence us,” Sunde said in a statement.

BREIN, a foundation dedicated to preventing intellectual property theft, filed a lawsuit against the file-sharing site last month in a Dutch court, choosing to summon Neij, Sunde and Svartholm Warg via Twitter and Facebook because the organzation was unable to locate the three men by other means.

The three were ordered to appear before a court in Amsterdam on July 21st in connection with a lawsuit in which BREIN demands that The Pirate Bay be shut down in the Netherlands.

BREIN’s lawyers argued in the Dutch court on Tuesday that Pirate Bay should be required to block access to all Dutch visitors because the site perpetrated copyright infringement by allowing millions of users a day to download copyrighted material, according to the technology news website TorrentFreak.

BREIN has also added Global Gaming Factory – the Swedish company scheduled to take over the site in a few weeks – to the lawsuit.

According to Sunde, Kuik accused the trio of orchestrating a cyber attack on BREIN’s website.

Sunde called BREIN’s claims “nonsense”.

He, along with Neij and Warg claim they were unaware of the lawsuit until they were told about it by a member of the press two days after the hearing occurred.

“Today we got information about the hearing after a journalist contacted us. We have sent an angry letter to the district court of Amsterdam about this and we’re very certain the court will have to throw the case out the window,” Svartholm said in a statement.

“None of us live in The Netherlands, operate from there or do even own the site they are suing over. There are so many errors in this lawsuit that it’s almost a crime to spend the courts time this way!”, Neij added.

While Swedish courts have yet to set a date for a hearing on the matter, Sunde is confident he and his two colleagues will prevail.

“I am sure there will be no other outcome for this except that Mr. Kuik will have to make an apology and also pay fines for his crimes,” said Sunde.