[x-pubpol] The Pirate Bay Departs Sweden And Sets Sail For Norway and Spain

[Joly MacFie]

https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-departs-sweden-and-sets-sail-for-norway-and-spain-130225/

Following threats of legal action in its traditional home of Sweden, a
few hours ago The Pirate Bay set sail for pastures new. Sweden’s
Pirate Party had been providing bandwidth to the site for the last
three years but came under intense pressure last week when a local
anti-piracy group threatened to sue. The Swedish pirates have now
stepped aside and handed the responsibilities to pirate parties in
Norway and Spain.

When it comes to hosting a website there are thousands of companies
and organizations around the world open for business. However, the
options reduce massively when your site is internationally infamous.

For this reason The Pirate Bay has been hosted in many countries over
the years, hopping across borders when one country or another became
intolerant to its activities. As legal and political pressure mounted
on the site its options narrowed further, with the threat of police
raids eventually forcing even more drastic countermeasures.

For a while now the site’s true location has been unknown, hidden away
in a far-off cloudand identifiable only by the connections it makes
with the outside world. However, the site has to come up for air
somewhere and for the last three years the site has received its
Internet connectivity from Scandinavia, courtesy of the Swedish Pirate
Party.

With the actual site located who-knows-where, last week the Pirate
Party received the call they had been expecting. Local anti-piracy
group Rights Alliance told the pirates and other Internet companies
further up the chain that continuing to work with The Pirate Bay
beyond Tuesday 26 would result in legal action.

Rights Alliance have the backing of the world’s largest movie and
music companies and fighting them in court would be a huge burden for
the Swedish Pirate Party, one that would sap their resources and
divert them from their mission. So, reluctantly, the Swedish pirates
have now stopped hosting The Pirate Bay, but not before a new plan was
put into action.

Sometime earlier today the ropes connecting the Pirate Bay galleon to
the shores of Sweden were cut and the ship sailed away into the
sunset. And then, as if by magic, it split into two parts and docked
in two brand new ports.

With a seamless transition The Pirate Bay is now being serviced by the
pirate parties ofNorway and Catalunya.

“TPB did of course have lots of backup transit lined up for ages. This
is however the first time we are going to show two at the same time,”
The Pirate Bay’s Winona told TorrentFreak.

“It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In
the end, maybe the anti-interneterians will understand that they can’t
win a fight when they have the people against them.”

The decision to choose Norway and Spain as locations for The Pirate
Bay is perhaps best viewed through the prism of recent court action in
the former and a complete lack of action in the latter.

Following initial pressure and a court case in 2009, the IFPI and
several movie studios failed to force local ISP Telenor to block The
Pirate Bay. Their 2010 appeal was also rejected when the court found
that there was no legal basis to force Telenor to block the site.
While that ruling on ISP liability will be of some comfort to the
Norwegian pirates, the position could change if the law is amended.

But of course there’s a backup – Spain.

Despite introducing new legislation after the US threatened to place
it on a trade blacklist, Spain currently offers a favorable
environment for file-sharing sites.

Last April and just a month after the so-called Sinde Law went live,
the Spanish Ministry of Culture revealed that the Comisión de
Propiedad Intelectual (Copyright Commission) had received dozens of
site closure requests from rightsholders. However, according to the
Intellectual Property Alliance, little has been done in response.

“To date, only two websites have closed in response to complaints
submitted to the IP Commission by IIPA’s member affiliates, and those
websites closed voluntarily,” the IIPA wrote in a recent submission to
the USTR.

“As of yet the IP Commission has not once made use of its authority to
request a judicial writ from the Administrative Court to order the
closure of a single infringing website or service. Meanwhile, IIPA is
aware of at least 80 complaints that remain outstanding. More than
ever, websites providing or linking to illegal content can be secure
in the knowledge that takedown measures are nonexistent and result in
no consequences,” they add.

Spain also offers other benefits to a site like The Pirate Bay since
under current law file-sharing linking sites are not explicitly
illegal. Also of interest is an IIPA complaint that Spain’s e-commerce
laws do not make it clear that infringement notices are an effective
means of providing ISPs with knowledge that infringement is occurring
on their services.

Which is just as well, since The Pirate Bay may well attract quite a
few of those.

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