TorrentFreak

With a new college year just around the corner, students will be expected to dig deep to pay for all the latest textbooks to accompany their chosen course. These books are not only crucial but also very expensive, a situation that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the administrator of a textbook-focused torrent site. His plan is to break up a publishing monopoly and educate the masses, regardless of how deep their pockets are.

A few months ago 21-year old Travis McCrea participated in the Canadian federal elections as candidate for the Pirate Party in Vancouver Centre. Aside from his political ambitions, McCrea also described himself as an entrepreneur. As with his political views, his business ventures are also focused on file-sharing related ideas, and most recently he started a torrent site to promote the distribution of movies.

Previously, representatives from the Finnish music industry filed a lawsuit against Elisa, one of the country’s largest ISPs, demanding that it should block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. In a reply filed at the district court, Elisa has refused to comply, describing the blocking demands as “unreasonable.”

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.

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.