Torrents Time Gets Cease-And-Desist Letter From Anti-Piracy Group

Just earlier today I was writing about an interesting new way to stream perfectly legal content. Torrents Time is a new plug-in that will allow you to take any (legal and not pirated) torrent, and stream it straight to your browser. That's pretty cool, right? Well, it seems that an anti-piracy group has taken offense to the new startup, and issued a cease-and-desist letter to the founders of Torrents Time.

It's rather troubling to hear that a group such as BREIN has taken the legal step of issuing a cease-and-desist letter to the Torrents Time creators. It's exactly this sort of action that has worked countless times in the past, and has virtually destroyed the entire torrenting industry as a whole. Oh, never mind, The Pirate Bay is still up and working despite various anti-piracy groups working for years to bring it down.

Let's take a look at the meat of the letter that Torrents Time received:

Through your website Torrents Time (https://torrents-time.com/) you are distributing the illegal application 'Torrents Time' that structurally and systematically facilitates, enables and participates in the making available of infringing content without the authorization of the respective copyright and neighbouring rights holders. 'Torrents Time' is enabling the illegal distribution of popular titles of films and of TV-Series that are published by the rights holders represented by BREIN and which have not been licensed for distribution through your system.

If you're wondering why they can't spell "neighboring" correctly, it's due to the fact that BREIN is a group located in the Netherlands, and that's just how they spell things. And the fact that they are the Netherlands is exactly why this particular group has the jurisdiction to send these sorts of letters. After all, Torrents Time is hosted on Dutch servers.

Just looking over that one paragraph brings a lot of questions to mind. Like, who ruled that Torrent Time's software was illegal? Who are the clients that this group represents? What is actually being distributed through their software? And why do Europeans like extra u's in their words? Well, as it turns out, Torrent Time had many of those same questions, and fired back their own letter:

You are therefore advised to seriously re-think your cease and desist demand and advise my Clients that you withdraw your demands. You are also hereby warned not to attempt to take action against any third party who utilizes Torrents Time or hosts it or co-operates therewith in any other manner. Failing to comply with my demands herein will prove itself as enormously costly to your organization and its members and could lead to criminal proceedings against yourself, on the grounds of illegal threats and extortion, the consequences of which I'm sure you are very well aware of.

In the circumstances, and in order not to incur un-necessary legal bills, I advised my Clients to send you a draft of my letter, unsigned, so as to stop the fight before it becomes unstoppable. Please do not take this gesture as a sign of weakness but as a good faith action. We are, like yourself, professionals very well versed with the subject matter at hands, for more than 3 decades. We hope that you are a member of the legitimately acting legal society and not a mob thug.

Personally, I'm excited to watch this play out. I'm fairly certain that there will be one clear victor in all of this. Specifically, the legal teams representing both sides, who will no doubt make plenty of money while drafting passive-aggressive notes for the two to pass back-and-forth.