The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host
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.
Following an injunction obtained by several major Hollywood movie studios, yesterday Pirate Bay bandwidth provider CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG took the decision to take the site offline while it digested the legal implications.
That meant that for several hours The Pirate Bay, for the first time in many months, was taken offline. An insider at the site told TorrentFreak that people shouldn’t worry, and that the site would soon return.
By start of play this morning that promise had been kept. In most corners of the globe, the world’s most resilient BitTorrent tracker was living up to its name by coming back online with a new and as yet unnamed host.
Now the identity of the site’s ISP has been revealed, and it is a somewhat of a surprising revelation.
“Today, on 18 May, the Swedish Pirate Party took over the delivery of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay,” says the Party’s Rick Falkvinge in a statement.
“We got tired of Hollywood’s cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay so we decided to offer the site bandwidth,” he adds. “It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity.”
The Pirate Party say they will provide bandwidth to the site’s homepage and search engine.
“The Pirate Bay is a search engine, and as such it is not responsible for the results,” notes Falkvinge.
The Party adds the attempts at censoring The Pirate Bay “is an attempt to silence one of today’s most important opinion makers in matters of civil liberties and rights on the web,” adding that it is “nothing less than political censorship, and something that any democratic-minded person must reject.”
With a general election coming up in Sweden, the Pirate Party’s move is also an attempt to reiterate what the Pirate Party stands for.
“It feels great to get an opportunity like this to demonstrate that we put our money were our mouth is,” Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “We’re not your run-of-the-mill politician who commissions reports and spends 8 hours a day avoiding blame. We’re people committing our own resources and time to the values we believe in.”
“The only thing we have in common with today’s politicians is that you can vote for us, and I hope this demonstrates how we are prepared to take responsibility for civil liberties and the future of the net in a very direct way,” he added.
Meanwhile, a Pirate Bay insider remains vague about the exact location(s) of the Pirate Bay servers, and ensured TorrentFreak that nothing is as it seems. The important thing though, is that the site is fully functional again.
