Hague against UPC, KPN, T-Mobile and Tele2 to also block The Pirate Bay for their customers. Ziggo and XS4ALL appealed this verdict and won, with BREIN being ordered to pay 326,000 Euro as a compensation for process costs. Lawsuit by FTD After a series of allegations that Usenet community Fill Threads Database (FTD) was acting illegally, the Dutch FTD started a lawsuit against BREIN in May 2009. BREIN president Tim Kuik alleged in a Dutch newspaper that "Although they [FTD] are not carrying illegal content on their servers, what FTD does is simply criminal". FTD is suing for a retraction of this libelous statement and demands a declaration from the courts that its activities are entirely within the law. On February 9, 2011 the Dutch District Court of Haarlem ruled, that FTD had acted unlawfully and issued an injunction. FTD was obliged to ban all references to files of BREIN members. The court also ruled that Tim Kuik was free to expose the conduct of FTD and communicate the opinion of BREIN. The request for rectification was therefore rejected by the court. FTD ceased all its operations a few weeks after the verdict. Alleged attack on BREIN website On the 1 June 2009 Tim Kuik published an online article claiming BREIN's website was "broken" by hackers performing DDoS attacks. He speculated about a possible connection with the intended court summons against The Pirate Bay. Several independent sources reported the site's deep links were still available (only the frontpage was inaccessible) and as such BREIN's claim of having been attacked was false. Brein responded claiming the attacks had stopped and that the site's year old backup had been used to recover the site. Because the backup was dated, the website was now under construction. Internet blog Geenstijl purportedly discovered BREIN's server was still fully operational and there had been no attack whatsoever - the complete news archive was still available. (A password was later added to BREIN's news archive to prevent further checks on availability.) On 23 June 2009 The Pirate Bay announced a lawsuit against Tim Kuik on libel charges, claiming The Pirate Bay had nothing to do with the alleged DDoS attack. Criticism In September 2009 BREIN CEO Tim Kuik attracted controversy when in a news conference he stated he was using a laptop confiscated from a "pirate" and given to him by someone involved with the case. BREIN