Whilst I do not want to judge whether the content provided by TPB should be illegal or legal (depends on country, law, etc), I do want to judge about what I wrote in the previous paragraph. How is a Dutch judge allowed to “order” a foreign entity (or group of people whatever) to shut down access from an entire country just because someone isn’t agreeing with the site? The power of the interwebs(yeah internet) is that there is a freedom of speech,press, and things. If something is forbidden in the country of hosting, then there is a case.. in that specific country. We tell everyone we are the western and civilized world, but instead we are far worse then China in our filtering methodology.

The judge must have been having a really bad day to allow this, give “jurisprudentie” about this and allow other funky things like “We have requested the persons to be in the court via email, facebook, twitter and more of those technology related things”. This goes beyond control. 1984 here we come, BigBrother is Brein and associated judges!.

Do note that I believe these sites have such a large success in the first place is because of the prices being too high for digital media (CD/DVD and so on). If the prices lower, you will see a dramatic decrease in downloading, if the prices are kept high, there will remain an increase in interest in these things. I wonder when people will start realising that.

For now, The Dutch Government, Judges and “organisations” had failed again, I do not understand how they can keep surviving. Stand up people!.

URL http://www.nu.nl/internet/2028662/stichting-brein-eist-afsluiten-piratenwebsite.html

URL: http://www.nu.nl/internet/2027713/heffing-op-internetaansluiting-om-kranten-te-steunen.html

That aside: the political situation in the Netherlands is changing dramatically. “Jan Modaal” is struck hard, not to mention the even less-earning people. The political leaders explain that everything is just regular, no worries etc. But they seem to forget that their salaries are much much higher then most people in the country, so increasing taxes (more on that later); doesn’t affect them as much as it does me, or others.

In the Netherlands we have the highest tax rate on the gasoline’s, a near 70% of the entire amount payed for gasoline flows to the state. Instead of it helping to improve roads and resolve traffic problems, just a limited amount of that money is being used to improve the roads et all.

We also have a few nature taxes, wrapping taxes which is unique in the Netherlands, provided the country with a near 18 billion euro’s. It should be spend on improving nature and stuff. But not even 1% is being used for that.

Regular tax-fee’s also increase to 20%, food and other important assets had an increase in prize that starts with 6% and stops at around 30%.

Salaries in the country globally rose with around 2 to 5% (my guess), which does not compensate the food increment prices at all.

So in short, everything is getting much more expensive, people are milked out instead of being helped, and no one actually stands up! It’s time to change that, someone has to stand up and offer resistence to this political debacle.

Another point of my ranting is that the European people said a loud NO to the European Consitution, first France and The Netherlands by public referendum, now Ireland as well. The Netherlands (Political team) rejected the NO and said “with a little word-smithing, we DO say YES to the consitution), towards Ireland it had been told: “it was a mistake, you should redo this, because you actually didn’t say no”. How hard can a NO be? Very hard in the opinion of the money-greeding people in the parlements. They see their profit drop in case the european constitution or whatever it is going to be called isn’t getting true. WAKE UP. The people said NO, ACCEPT THAT.

I get sick and tired of this country’s political leaders, sadly I lack knowledge and experience to really change something, but I do know that in case nobody steps up, life is getting much worse the upcoming years. The country has to unite, and pick a stand.

So far my first (and perhaps only) ranting about the political situation in the Netherlands. I will also translate this to the Dutch language for native readers.