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Nintendo can welcome two new pirate site blocking orders in Europe at the start of the year. Last week, a Dutch court ruled in favor of local anti-piracy group BREIN, ordering NXBrew to be blocked. A few days earlier, a German court issued a blocking injunction against another Nintendo Switch piracy site, NSWPedia. Through voluntary cooperation deals, these orders are honored by the major ISPs in these countries.
Pirate site blocking is a common practice in dozens of countries around the world, and the Netherlands and Germany are no exceptions.
The neighboring countries rely on court-ordered blocking decisions, with a twist; ISPs in both countries voluntarily agreed to honor orders against other providers. At the start of this year, this applied to two Nintendo-related pirate sites.
Dutch Dynamic ‘NXBrew’ Blocking Order
In the Netherlands, the Rotterdam District Court granted a blocking order requested by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. Last week, the court ordered local ISP Delta Fiber to block access to NXBrew.net, a popular platform that reportedly links to more than 12,000 pirated Nintendo Switch games.
This is the first site blocking order against a gaming-related site in the Netherlands.
The order includes a dynamic blocking provision, requiring Delta Fiber to also block future domains, subdomains, proxies, and mirrors. This means if NXBrew shifts to new domains to evade the blockades, BREIN can add them without returning to court. For now, however, only the .net domain is targeted.
Delta Fiber made an appearance in the Dutch court, but it offered no substantive defense. The court subsequently granted BREIN’s requests in full, adding NXBrew to the national blocklist.
Nintendo was not directly involved in the legal proceeding; instead, its rights were represented by BREIN, which is the primary driver behind Dutch blocking requests.
ISPs and Google Cooperate
While Delta Fiber was the only targeted ISP, other major Dutch Internet providers have agreed to follow suit under the site-blocking covenant that was signed in October 2021.
In addition to broadening the ISP blockades, the covenant also requires BREIN to complete a step-by-step plan before taking legal action. This includes trying to contact the site operators or urging the respective hosting companies to take action. A blocking order should be used as the last resort.
In addition to notifying all ISPs, BREIN says that it also sent Google a copy of the ruling requesting removal of NXBrew links from its search results. While not part of the covenant, the search engine is known to voluntarily comply with ISP blocking orders, even when the company itself is not named. That further increases the scope of the injunction.
German Court Blocks NSWPedia
The Dutch order is not the only Nintendo-linked blocking action this year. On January 27, Cologne Regional Court in Germany ruled that NSWPedia, another piracy site, must be blocked by German ISPs.
German ISPs also agreed to cooperate through the CUII (Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet) framework, which coordinates blocking efforts between rightsholders and ISPs. Under this system, one court order triggers voluntary blocks across participating providers, similar to the Dutch scheme.
NSWPedia was classified as a “structurally copyright-infringing website.” Through a representative random sample, the court determined that between 94.4% and 99.8% of the content was infringing.
CUII’s implementation order doesn’t mention the rightsholder and the underlying court order was not immediately available. However, we expect that Nintendo (or their affiliate) is the complainant.
Transparency Concerns
While both systems rely on judicial oversight, transparency remains a concern for some, especially when ISPs don’t substantially push back in court proceedings.
Transparency is particularly limited in Germany, where there is no official public blocklist. This lack of openness led a German developer named Lina to create CUIILliste.de, an unofficial monitoring site that has exposed several blocking errors.
In the Netherlands, some ISPs offer more transparency. This includes Delta Fiber, which provides a list of all blocked domain names. The list, which includes piracy and Russian propaganda blocks, is currently a few hundred entries long and publicly accessible on the company’s website.
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A copy of the CUII blocking implementation statement on NSWPedia, referencing the Cologne court order, is available here (pdf). TorrentFreak has seen a copy of the NXBrew ruling issued by the Rotterdam Court, but it has not been published publicly yet.
