Anti-piracy group BREIN's attempt to have The Pirate Bay blocked in the Netherlands continues in a hearing heard by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently.

BREIN seeks to have The Pirate Bay blocked by Dutch internet service providers (ISPs) Ziggo and XS4ALL and claims that TPB communicates copyrighted material to the public and facilitates infringement for profit.

The anti-piracy group, which started this fight in 2014 by having the case heard by The Court of The Hague only to end up losing after the blocking was proven to strip the ISPs of their entrepreneurial freedom, cited a similar case won by Playboy and ruled by ECJ as well.

The company dueled with Dutch blog GeenStijl.nl, who ECJ ruled to knowingly publish links to infringing material despite not hosting the actual copyrighted works. BREIN believes that the same is at play on The Pirate Bay.

BRIEN Chief Tim Kuik argued in an interview with Torrent Freak that The Pirate Bay is operating without permission to distribute the works of rights holders. In addition, TPB also actively and intentionally maintains a catalog of these torrent links for profit and even makes magnet links of all of them.

"The service providers say that TPB facilitates infringement but does not infringe itself. Their arguments seemed all over the place," Kuik said.

"They shamelessly said TPB is neutral and passive like Google but at the same time also agreed it is unlawful, not like Google. Also, one of their arguments to reject blocking was that it is more proportionate for BREIN to go after infringing users (their own subscribers)," he went on to say.

The European Commission agrees with BREIN and argues that "both civil and criminal law" can be enforced n The Pirate Bay, while France and Spain agree that the site is doing infringement and should be blocked.

The Pirate Bay is one of the last Torrent giants standing following the downfall of file-sharing heavyweights like Kickass Torrents and Torrentz.eu.

A ruling is expected to be revealed April next year.