Stockholm's district court has ordered The Pirate Bay to be disconnected from the Internet, threatening Swedish ISP's large fines unless they cut off the internet connection to the popular BitTorrent tracker.
Threatened to face a fine of 500,000 kronor (USD70,000, the Sweddish ISP's stopped providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay. The web site had been offline yesterday although its administration has been able to relocated it in different servers and bring it back online today.
This is the latest legal action against the Pirate Bay, which had been facing a verdict of the Stockholm district court earlier this year. The court found that the four persons involved in running the web site worked as a team, were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. The verdict had found guilty all four persons involved ordering them to pay US$3.6 million in damages. The four have appealed the verdict.
According to the court ruling, the censorship of The Pirate Bay will continue pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount last July. Back then, the movie studios sued The Pirate Bay over movies and television series, demanding that the men who run the site to be prevented from operating the site.
Rick Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party told
TorrentFreak "This is absolutely ridiculous. The Court seems to consider themselves above the Constitution," while criticizing the effect that these civil actions are having on freedom of speech. "This clarifies how copyright law has become untenable, and how information is lacking political skills in the judiciary," he added.
The Pirate Bay has been subject of a takeover by Global Gaming Factory (GGF), a Swedish online games firm, claimed on June 30 it acquired the Pirate Bay 8.5 million dollars.