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Peter Sunde Brings Criminal Charges Against BREIN, Claims They Falsified Documents Against The Pirate Bay
from the spectrial-indeed dept
You may remember, back in July, that a Dutch court made an odd ruling against The Pirate Bay at the behest of BREIN, the local anti-piracy group. Now, there was a lot of things odd about the case. BREIN has always been quite aggressive in demanding that sites be blocked or that ISPs be forced to block sites, but this case went really far. BREIN was able to bring the case without even letting any of the four defendants (the same four who were on trial in Sweden) know about the case. However, BREIN told the court that the defendants were fairly summoned, despite no evidence that was true at all. BREIN also claimed that The Pirate Bay had launched a DDoS attack on BREIN's website, and seemed so close to the court that when the defendants themselves asked the court for the very ruling made against them, the court told them that they could only get the copy directly from BREIN.
Of course, after all this happened, a second problem cropped up. Swedish authorities did an investigation and came to the conclusion -- as the four defendants had said all along -- that those four guys did not actually own The Pirate Bay. Instead, it was a company called Reservella, information that came out to the public after the attempt by GGF to buy The Pirate Bay (which has since collapsed).
BREIN wasted little time in adding Reservella to its lawsuits... but then did something strange. It came up with a credit report that purports to prove that one of the four defendants, Fredrik Neij, is the CEO and a director of Reservella. However, there were some oddities in that credit report, and Peter Sunde (one of the other defendants, better known as brokep) began investigating and has rather detailed evidence that the entire credit report is a fake. Almost none of the information on the report checks out, and the companies listed -- including Experian, who supposedly supplied the credit report, claim that they have no record of this particular credit report at all.
Sunde is now filing criminal charges against BREIN and its boss Tim Kuik, claiming that they forged a document and used it for fraud (trying to get money out of these four defendants). As Sunde notes, such charges seem to be far more serious than inducing copyright infringement. The evidence that Sunde lays out certainly looks convincing that the document is fake, but what's still not clear is how BREIN got the document, and whether it was responsible for creating the document, or if it was merely convinced that the fake document was real from someone else.
Still, it doesn't look good for BREIN to be caught using what appear to be faked documents in its lawsuit.
