October 11, 2011

On September 26, 2011, the Antwerp Court of Appeal ordered two Belgium ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. The ISPs, Telenet and Belgacom, were ordered to implement DNS blocking on 11 domains to do this.

The legal basis for the order was Article art. 87, §1, al.2 of the Belgian Copyright Act. This provision transposes Article 8(3) of the EU InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/CE. This Article provides that

“Member States shall ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right.”