The party, which has long stood for the same free sharing of information ideals as The Pirate Bay, agreed to begin supplying bandwidth to the site. For three years the arrangement went along just fine, but now there is a serious challenge to the status quo.

This Tuesday the Pirate Party announced that they had received legal threats from the Swedish Rights Alliance. Stop serving TPB with Internet connectivity, they ordered, or face legal action in a week. But can the party be held liable as a traditional host might?

Yesterday, in an attempt to illustrate the relationship the party has with the site, former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde described the technical setup and how it differs from a regular hosting arrangement.

“There is no question of the Pirate Party being a final destination for The Pirate Bay, but rather a stretch of road. [The party's systems] store no data, there is no data in them. Everything is in cables only temporarily,” he wrote.

But despite the technical differences between hosting and simply pushing data around, the threats from Rights Alliance persist.

Serious Tubes, the company that sells bandwidth to the Pirate Party, also received similar threats from Rights Alliance. They were ordered to stop providing bandwidth to the Pirate Party and must now consider their position and reveal their intentions by next Tuesday, February 26.

But not content with moving at least two steps up the bandwidth chain with legal threats, new information has revealed that Rights Alliance have taken things even further by threatening to sue Portlane, the Swedish Internet provider that supplies Serious Tubes with bandwidth.

To underline just how detached this situation has become, picture this. The Pirate Bay (hosted who-knows-where) is connected directly (or maybe indirectly) to the Pirate Party. In turn the party are connected to Serious Tubes, who in turn are connected to Portlane. So what we have here is the supplier of the supplier of the supplier of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay coming under legal threat. That’s quite a chain.

Nevertheless, indications are that the long chain of intermediaries, all of which act as “mere conduits” as far as Internet connectivity is concerned, are taking the threats fairly seriously.

A little while ago Cluez, a member of the Pirate Party’s admin group, told TorrentFreak via party founder Rick Falkvinge that Portlane are no longer involved in the supply chain to Pirate Bay.

“Serious Tubes routed past Portlane on their own initiative, because of a threat against Portlane, as to not put Portlane in unnecessary trouble,” he confirmed.

But before readers begin frantically opening new tabs to check that The Pirate Bay is still alive, rest assured that panic is not required. Measures are already in place to safeguard the site’s uptime.

“Obviously, Serious Tubes (and Pirate Party) are now getting their bandwidth from elsewhere,” comments Rasmus Fleischer, one of the founders of Piratbyrån, the group that founded The Pirate Bay.

“No one should think that TPB will stand or fall solely with the Pirate Party supply.”

It’s clear that The Pirate Bay are well prepared for these kinds of attacks on their infrastructure, as the lack of downtime shows. Furthermore, when their entire site can be squeezed onto the smallest of USB sticks, reappearance in new locations is possible in a matter of minutes.

TorrentFreak contacted Portlane for an official comment but we are yet to receive a response.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This week the pressure became too much and facing huge potential damages and a possible jail sentence for its owner, CB3ROB had to cease providing bandwidth to the site, which effectively shut it down – for a few hours.

In typical Pirate Bay style the site bounced back, supported by controversial hosting provided by the Swedish Pirate Party.

Even though the site was down for a short time, file transfers didn’t stop as those continued to be facilitated by DHT, PEX and the separate OpenBitTorrent (OBT) tracker. Hosted in Sweden, OBT also made the news this week when a court ruled Wednesday that ISP Portlane must hand over the identities of its operators to the movie studios.

Although that decision could be appealed, the OpenBitTorrent site and tracker suddenly went offline in the last 24 hours. It now transpires that the Svea Court of Appeals was busy yesterday, issuing three injunctions on behalf of the studios.

TorrentFreak contacted Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted who provided us with the following information.

Injunction 1

The Court ordered Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to cease to assist in conducting The Pirate Bay web site consisting of a web site including search engine and database functions on which torrent files may be stored and a tracker.

Injunction 2

The Court ordered Black Internet to cease to provide Internet access to The TPB web site consisting of a web site including search engine and databasefunctions on which torrent files may be stored and a tracker.

Injunction 3

The Court ordered Portlane to cease to provide Internet access to the Tracker with address tracker.openbittorrent.com.

In respect of injunction 1, it’s believed the pair have been banned from not only operating TPB, but any similar site in the future.

It seems reasonable to conclude that it is injunction 3 which took OpenBitTorrent offline yesterday. The site remains down today, with any attempt to contact it being reported as being blocked. TorrentFreak has learned that OpenBitTorrent is currently trying to find a new hosting provider.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted, seemingly without any solid proof above mere suspicion, said her clients believe that OBT is simply a re-branded version of the tracker previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

In December 2009, the case went to court. For the studios, the outcome wasn’t good. Even though it was agreed that OpenBitTorrent was being used in some cases to facilitate the distribution of copyright works, the Stockholm District Court rejected calls to force Portlane to close down the site.

The court ruled that Portlane would have to be doing more than just hosting the site in order to be considered guilty of contributing to copyright infringement. The District Court’s decision was interim and the issue is set to be settled fully sometime next summer.

Unsatisfied with this decision, the 13 Hollywood studios who brought the action against Portlane are now taking their case to the Court of Appeal.

The application says that Portlane has not done enough to stop the illicit file-sharing claimed to be facilitated by OpenBitTorrent, so the ISP should take responsibility for the infringements.

Going on to incorporate an interesting sexual analogy, the studios are comparing Portlane with property owners who knowing allow prostitution on their premises without doing anything to stop it.

Just like those that ignore the sex-for-money activities of their tenants, the studios say that by turning a blind eye to activities on OpenBitTorrent, Portlane should be deemed to have encouraged law breaking via the tracker.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

OpenBitTorrent is merely a tracker, carries no .torrent files and also operates a full DMCA-style notice and takedown policy. Despite this, during mid-November Hollywood movie studios moved to try and shut down the fledgling service.

However, rather than deal with the tracker’s operators (who we are told offered to co-operate) they instead sued the site’s hosting provider, Portlane.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in a comment.

Even though it was agreed that the tracker could be used to facilitate the distribution of copyright works, the Stockholm District Court has now rejected Hollywood’s request to shut down OpenBitTorrent.

The court ruled that in order for Portlane to be considered as contributing to copyright infringement, it must be guilty of more than just providing Internet access to the site.

“We are happy with the court’s decision. It is indeed the only correct decision. We as an ISP should neither act or get the task to police the Internet,” a Portlane spokesperson told TorrentFreak in a statement.

Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted is disappointed that the court didn’t consider their “suspicions” that OBT is linked to The Pirate Bay.

“The court has not touched on the link between the tracker and The Pirate Bay, and that all the .torrent files on The Pirate Bay include [OBT's] tracker as the default tracker,” she said in a statement, adding: “The day we checked, there were 550,000 works that file-sharers [could download] through the tracker.”

The District Court’s decision is interim and the issue will be settled fully sometime next Summer.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Even though the sale never went through, OpenBitTorrent has proved its worth recently, since the Pirate Bay tracker had been struggling to stay online. That particular battle formally ended yesterday, with the announcement it had shut down for good.

Unlike most BitTorrent trackers, OpenBitTorrent is not linked to a torrent site where users can download or search for torrents. Indeed, its involvement in the process is very much limited. The tracker is merely assisting in connecting peers with each other based on a hash value, without having any control over, or knowledge of what is being tracked. It also operates a clear DMCA-style takedown policy.

Despite this setup, the Hollywood movie studios have made the decision to try and shut it down by taking the tracker’s hosting company, Portlane, to court.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in a comment. She further noted that the domain of the tracker was originally registered by Fredrik Neij, one of the Pirate Bay founders.

For Portlane, this is not its first experience of a copyright holder demanding the takedown of a BitTorrent site it hosts. Earlier this year, the IFPI asked Portlane to close several BitTorrent sites, which they refused to do. This time around Portlane is not going to comply without a fight either, citing freedom of expression and freedom of information as their defense.

It is indeed questionable if OpenBitTorrent can be held responsible for any copyright infringements that may take place on BitTorrent. Aside from the alleged connection to The Pirate Bay, the site’s assistance in the downloading process is not greater than that of BitTorrent outfits Vuze and uTorrent. Indeed, it could be considered to be less.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.