Anvers Court of Appeal, Civil, The Belgian Anti-piracy federation ASBL/VZW v. Telenet SA/NV & Belgacom SA/NV (“The Pirate Bay case I), No. 3399/Rep. 2011/9314, September, 26 2011

Reversing the decision of the Anvers Court of First Instance of July, 8 2010 and ordering Belgian ISPs, Telenet and Belgacom, to block DNS extensions for 11 domain names related to ThePirateBay. The Court clarified that ISPs do not themselves infringe copyright and are not liable for the content transmitting though their services. However, the safe harbours included in the e-commerce Directive do not prevent the court to order them to block infringing webistes, if, according to Article 8.2 of the Infosoc Directive "their services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or a related right." These blocking orders, the Court continued, do not impose on the ISPs a general obligation to monitor the information that they transmit because the injunction only concerns a number of exhaustively mentioned domain names. The Court specifically rejected the plaintiff's request to extend the injunction to any other ThePirateBay related website that the plaintiff may have reported to the ISPs.