October 5, 2009 1:22 PM PDT Hollywood hunts The Pirate Bay; site down again
by Greg Sandoval BuzzUpdate: 11:05 p.m. Monday: To note that the site was down most of Monday.
The Pirate Bay was inaccessible most of the day Monday after a group representing copyright owners forced the BitTorrent search engine's bandwidth provider to cut off service, according to a published report.
NForce, the Pirate Bay's latest Internet service provider, complied with a request to shut off service to The Pirate Bay made by Netherlands-based antipiracy group Brein, according to online news site Tweakers.net.
Monday's outage followed a three-hour blackout of The Pirate Bay on Friday. The blackouts are the result of work performed by attorneys based in Sweden who are employed by the big movie studios, according to my film industry sources. The lawyers are hunting down whoever provides bandwidth to The Pirate Bay and then using the threat of lawsuits to pressure the ISPs to stop.
Black Internet, the Pirate Bay's onetime ISP, was threatened with fines in Sweden unless it cut off service. The Pirate Bay then moved to an a Ukrainian ISP, which also received threats, according to the blog TorrentFreak. NForce was next and now that company has had to comply.
Just where The Pirate Bay will go next or how long the site will be down isn't clear. The founders of the site have vowed to continue operating the site no matter what.
Edited by eniparadoxgma, 07 October 2009 - 05:19 AM.