The European Court of Justice has heard a case between the most popular torrent tracker, a Dutch anti-piracy group, and a few local Internet service providers. The court has to decide whether The Pirate Bay should be blocked at the ISP level, even though it is not a direct infringer.

Two years ago, the Court of The Hague delivered a ruling in a case that had previously forced two Dutch ISPs to block the site. The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN filed the lawsuit. At the time, it faced defeat with the court ruling that the blockade against the torrent tracker restricted the entrepreneurial freedoms of the Internet service provider. This is how The Pirate Bay remained accessible in the Netherlands. However, BREIN escalated the matter to the Supreme Court, which eventually postponed its final decision, referring key questions to the EU Court of Justice.

The hearing took place yesterday, and the European Court of Justice was asked to decide whether the torrent site communicates infringing content to the public or whether it can be blocked for facilitating infringement.

In this case, BREIN points at the decision handed down by the court a couple months ago, where Playboy defeated Dutch blog GeenStijl.nl for deliberately publishing links to content it knew to be infringing, but didn’t host itself. The court ruled that when a person knew that a posted link leads to illegal content, it constitutes a communication to the public.

BREIN thinks that the same can be applied to the TPB case. The anti-piracy group has also gained support from the European Commission, which announced that it stands on the side of BREIN. The Advocate General will issue his advice in 2017.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.