Tim (Timotheus Jacobus) Kuik, a law graduate of the
University of Amsterdam (1982), oversaw the activities of BREIN from its inception. He assumed leadership of BREIN in 1999 after returning to his native
Netherlands from
Los Angeles, where he had headed the
Motion Picture Association's global anti-piracy programme from 1996. He had originally worked for
CIC Video, a joint venture between
Paramount Pictures and
Universal Pictures which represented a change in policy from attempts to ban
VHS, and led MPA's anti-piracy activities in Europe from 1992, which included interventions in
Hungary and
Bulgaria. Before leaving Los Angeles, on 21 February 1998 he presented a paper titled
How the East Was Won: Legal Aspects of the Entertainment Business in Russia at a conference there. By the time of its publication in summer 1999 under the changed title
Piracy in Russia: An Epidemic, Kuik was listed as the General Director of BREIN. On 30 July 2009, an Amsterdam
civil law court ruled in favour of BREIN in its lawsuit over copyright infringement against the three alleged operators of
The Pirate Bay (TPB), who were not officially summoned by the court. In August 2009, Kuik addressed the
Hacking at Random conference on the future of copyright laws and was confronted by TPB's founder
Gottfrid Svartholm over his allegations that TPB is run for profit. Kuik was unable to substantiate his claims. In October 2012, BREIN won a landmark case in
The Hague against the Dutch
hosting service provider XS Networks, which had refused to shut down a
torrent-based
file sharing site at BREIN's request and hand over the personal details of its owner to BREIN. The court found XS Network liable for damages for copyright infringement and ordered it to disclose information about the site owner. The ruling was seen as a precedent in that it held hosting providers
legally responsible for not complying with requests of industry interest groups in advance of a court order. In October 2020, BREIN won its ten-year-long lawsuit against three
internet service providers (ISPs) –
Ziggo,
KPN and
XS4ALL – when a
Lelystad court ordered the ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. In March 2021, the BREIN employee Bastiaan van Ramshorst sent a copy of the blocking order against TPB to
Google, although the company had not been named in it. In November 2021, BREIN and the Dutch Copyright Federation concluded an official
covenant-type agreement with six ISPs (Ziggo, KPN,
Delta Fiber,
T-Mobile,
Canal+ and NLConnect), negotiated with the support of the Dutch
Ministry of Justice and Security, in which all the participating operators agreed to block a website if one of them received a blocking order against it. BREIN was charged with updating the
domain lists of blocked websites, while the ISPs agreed to bear technical costs of enforcing the blocks. By November 2021 Google voluntarily complied with enforcing the block against TPB, an action that was reported to be unprecedented on its part. BREIN claimed that Google found itself in "the same situation" as the Dutch ISPs who had signed the recent covenant. BREIN subsequently reported further collaboration with Google entailing removing blocked domains from
local search results. In March 2024, BREIN obtained a court order from the Rotterdam District Court for a Dutch ISP to block the
Library Genesis and
Anna's Archive shadow libraries, thus expanding the existing blocklist under the 2021 covenant. The court issued a dynamic blocking order covering all future domains. In April 2024, Kuik retired and was replaced by Bastiaan van Ramshorst, a business law graduate (2000) and a member of the
International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property, who joined BREIN around 2010 and whom Kuik had prepared as his successor over the previous ten years. In an interview given on the occasion of his retirement, Kuik admitted that the business model behind
Netflix,
Spotify and
Napster largely derives from the
copyright-infringing streaming services BREIN has sought to close down. ==Shutdowns of alleged piracy sites==