Today, exactly five years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. At the time the entertainment industries hoped that this would silence the deviant BitTorrent site for good, but in hindsight we can conclude that they had actually awakened a monster. The raid and the ongoing battle that later unfolded reads like a script for an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster.
The Pirate Bay is at the center of a new lawsuit filed at the District Court in Helsinki, Finland. Music industry representatives have filed suit against one of the major Internet Service Providers in the country, demanding that it blocks subscriber access to the BitTorrent site. The Pirate Bay is currently one of the most visited websites in Finland.
Several major entertainment industry companies including Columbia Pictures and Universal Music have updated the injunction against the founders of The Pirate Bay. The initial order prevented the founders from operating the BitTorrent site on pain of a 500,000 Swedish kronor fine, but it became unenforceable after The Pirate Bay removed its tracker.
Source: Hollywood Beefs Up Injunction Against Pirate Bay Founders
Despite continuous pressure from the entertainment industries, The Pirate Bay isn’t planning to cease its operations anytime soon. Instead, the crew ordered 10 shiny new servers which just arrived at a datacenter located in a Swedish mountain complex. With the new hardware the site should be more redundant, reducing possible downtime to a minimum.
Source: The Pirate Bay Ships New Servers to Mountain Complex
BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is fighting the injunction and summary judgment issued by the District Court of California last summer in their case against the MPAA. Yesterday, both parties clashed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, with isoHunt claiming there is no evidence they can be held liable for copyright infringements that may have been committed by its users.
A few days ago an Italian court ordered all ISPs to block subscriber access to BTjunkie, leaving hundreds of thousands of Italians with the task of finding a new torrent site. Or perhaps not? Just hours after the news was made public, a brand new and ad-free proxy site was launched. The site allows Italians to browse an uncensored web and access BTjunkie, as well as another popular blocked site, The Pirate Bay.
Yesterday saw the announcement that The Pirate Bay has launched a new dating site. PirateDate.com carries the unmistakable Pirate Bay galleon and replicates the well-worn pirate-style font, but how connected with The Pirate Bay is it? Well, perhaps not as closely as some might presume, but being mentioned in the same breath could be good enough.
The US District Court of California has issued a permanent injunction against the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, forcing it to shut down in the United States. IsoHunt is expected to block all access to US visitors in response to the decision, but no action has been taken thus far.
After its previous bandwidth provider had to take the site offline due to concerns over an aggressive Hollywood injunction, today The Pirate Bay is fully back in operation with a surprising new supplier. From a few hours ago, in a move intended to “stand up for freedom of expression”, the Swedish Pirate Party became the site’s new host.
The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.
