The Pirate Bay to sue anti-piracy agencies?

[Gio Takahashi]

The Pirate bay, which calls itself the world?s largest bittorrent tracker, has announced its intention to file for damages against The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) an organisation which claims to represent the interests of recording industries worldwide. The website want compensation for the traffic that was blocked by a Danish ISP after a court ruled that it had assisted copyright infringement after allowing access to the site. The ruling apparently contravened European Union Law.

The Pirate Bay has also announced that any money it receives in settlement will be used to provide grants to Danish musicians who share their music online. Earlier, they had launched, a new website, called the Jasper Bay after the head of Danish IFPI, which contained instructions on how to circumvent the block.

The original ruling has also come under scrutiny because The Pirate Bay was not involved in the proceedings at all and was not heard in court. The IFPI also had no rights over the music of some of the people it claimed have suffered as a result of file sharing, and had named them in the law suite without consulting them. It also transpired that the police officer in charge of the investigation might have been hired by Warner Bros while the investigation was in progress.

Prior to this, the Pirate Bay had also filed a police complaint against anti-piracy company Media Defender, which works on behalf of Sony, Universal, Paramount and Ubisoft amongst others. The Pirate Bay showed that emails leaked from media defender?s servers clearly showed that the company had launched illegal denial of service attacks on the Pirate Bay?s servers, engaged in illegal hacking and repeatedly flooded them with spam.


Source: TechoNoid (http://techonoid.com/the-pirate-bay-to-sue-anti-piracy-agencies)

[deathofcheese]

Good for them.

Too bad they couldn't be legally represented in Sweden(?)'s government (under the Pirate Party), but to see them getting back at some of their attackers is just as sweet.

[Killer_Man_]

Actually, I've read a lot about it.

They even have filed claims on them to get money for the servers they raided/stole from TPB.

Though, the only one thing that keeps PB from being shut down. It only hosts trackers, and till trackers are made illegally in their country. There isn't anything anyone can do really to them.

[Gio Takahashi]

It has been known that various companies actually tried to DDOS and hired hackers to take PB down.

[Killer_Man_]

Well not only that but I am talking about the 'illegal' raids of their servers. No search warrent or anything was given.

[deathofcheese]

Well not only that but I am talking about the 'illegal' raids of their servers. No search warrent or anything was given.I thought the cops did get a search warrant, but the terms under which the warrant was granted made what they actually did with the warrant illegal?

[Killer_Man_]

From what the website, their website, it says that they stole their property and had no right to search/take their servers.

[Gio Takahashi]

There was an article about what various company (Sony, Paramount, etc) that raided Pirate Bay illegally. that's pretty much what KM's referring to. I'll see if I can find it tomorrow.

[Killer_Man_]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

[deathofcheese]

Pirate Bay Raid Investigation Finished (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/02/1631203) [Slashdot.org]
"The Swedish Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has finished the investigation (http://www.nordichardware.com/news,6020.html) of the Pirate Bay raid where close to 200 servers were confiscated. Just a fragment of these were actually Pirate Bay's and this led to both the police and prosecutor being charged with official misconduct, but the judges dropped the cases. In the report published by the JO he concludes that the judges were right, but there is also some very interesting information about how the MPA, IFPI and the American embassy tried to push the Swedish Minister of Justice and Secretary of State into influencing the police and the prosecutor to act upon The Pirate Bay."JO's investigation of the Pirate Bay raid is done (http://www.nordichardware.com/news,6020.html) [nordichardware.org] (Too long to quote.)

Police raid Pirate Bay file-sharing site (http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2157376/pirate-bay-bit-torrent-site) [vnunet.com]
Police in Sweden have raided one of the world's largest BitTorrent (http://www.bittorrent.com/) file-sharing sites.

Servers at hosting company Rix Port80 containing files for The Pirate Bay (http://www.thepiratebay.org/) were confiscated, the group confirmed on its website.

The Pirate Bay did not directly host any copyrighted material but offered small torrent files and tracker software allowing users to locate and download files from each other.

The legality of offering such a service has yet to be tested in the Swedish courts.

The site was one of the most popular file-sharing sites on the internet, serving over a million pages a day.

The Motion Picture Association of America (http://www.mpaa.org/) (MPAA) welcomed the actions of the Swedish police.

"The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbours for internet copyright thieves," said MPAA chairman and chief executive Dan Glickman.

"Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the internet."

The operators of The Pirate Bay remain defiant, however, promising to be "up and fully functional within a day or two".While it's entirely likely that the whole thing only happened because of pressure from the MPAA, Swedish courts granted the police force warrants to search. You can't search without a warrant and if the police didn't have a warrant, the Pirate Bay guys would be all over them for illegal search and seizure (unless Swedish law is very different from what I understand of America's about search and seizure). As it stands, a lot of hardware was seized that wasn't included in the original warrant. However, since the hardware was seized from the hosting company and not TPB, then TPB doesn't really have a reason to do anything about it.

[Gio Takahashi]

"Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the internet."Interesting.

[Killer_Man_]

The thing is though, they can't stop them cause in Sweden. Having trackers isn't illegal as far as I know. Since there are no FILES ON the server. They can't really do that much, that is what is pissing off people like Microsoft and etc.

[deathofcheese]

If you read some of these stories a little more carefully, you'll notice that the official charge against TPB people is of conspiracy to cause intellectual property theft and copyright infringement. These guys aren't getting charged with the actual act of copyright violation, they're getting charged with allowing it to happen and providing tools (torrent files and trackers) to aid in the act.

[Killer_Man_]

Yes I know but they seem gun-ho that by Swedish law that they obtain their property. Unlawfully and are going to fight it.