In the summer of 2008, The Pirate Bay was censored in Italy when the country’s ISPs were ordered to prevent their subscribers from accessing the site.

The decision was appealed and The Pirate Bay won their case, with the Court of Bergamo ruling that no foreign website could be censored for alleged copyright infringement. The block was lifted temporarily as the case again went to appeal.

Recently the Supreme Court conducted a review of the case and decided that ISPs can indeed be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even those outside Italy operated foreign nationals. Subsequently the Court of Bergamo ruled that the country’s ISPs must block all customer access to The Pirate Bay.

Although the block is aimed squarely at Italian users, it has come to light that there has been some collateral damage.

Just to the south of the Italian autonomous region of Sicily lies the island of Malta, the smallest and one of Europe’s most densely populated countries.

Melita Cable is the leading provider of broadband services in Malta and is the only broadband provider to offer Internet speeds up to 30Mbits which makes it popular with file-sharers.

However, ever since the Italian courts ordered the Pirate Bay blackout, Melita’s customers have been complaining that they have no access to the site but the company insists it’s not at fault.

TorrentFreak spoke with a technical representative from Melita who told us: “The mentioned website is currently undergoing legal actions from the Italian Supreme Court. As our backbone is situated in Italy, access to www.piratebay.org has been blocked to all of our users.”

Melita says it is in discussions with its bandwidth supplier to see what can be done but told us that the situation is out of their hands.

“This is not something which can be fixed from our end. While it is still blocked by ISPs in Italy, we will be unable to provide this website to any of our customers.”

According to Alexa, The Pirate Bay is currently the 40th most popular site in Malta.

As was the case in Italy after the block took hold, Maltese BitTorrent fans will now be seeking out alternatives to The Pirate Bay – they won’t be hard to find.

Last year, video retailers said that the authorities weren’t doing enough to combat online piracy and said Maltese ISPs should do their part.

“There are loads of things that one may do to block these sites such as protocol and port blocking, bandwidth capping and shaping amongst other things,” they complained.

Or get Italy to do it for you.

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In the face of a massive and sustained legal onslaught orchestrated by the combined might of the global music and movie industries, one might have expected The Pirate Bay to fold up and die.

Yet as we sit here on the brink of December 2009, the site remains open. No other site in BitTorrent history has ever weathered so many storms, so many obstacles and so many setbacks, but still prevailed.

When threatened in an aggressive manner, most torrent sites show a little bravado but ultimately comply with the shutdown requests. Not so The Pirate Bay.

The huge raid back in 2006 resulted in the loss of masses of equipment, and this alone would’ve been sufficient to break the will of a lesser site. But within days the site was back online, and since then has hopped around various hosts and countries, evading every attempt to mortally wound it.

Earlier this year the 2006 raid bore its fruit, with the founders of the site being found guilty, given huge fines and ordered to spend time in jail. But even this development didn’t deter the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. With appeals pending, hope remains.

Not even the promised financial penalties could cripple the site or its operators. Could the authorities find any assets belonging to the founders? Not a chance. Even the site had been handed over to new owners, Seychelles-based Reservella.

Threatening the site’s host would also prove useless, as the company is owned by Fredrik Neij. But eventually the authorities took direct action, by threatening the site’s indirect bandwidth supplier with fines if they continued to supply it with a connection to the Internet.

So down the site went yet again. True to form, back it came again within hours with a new ISP. Within 20 minutes that company was threatened by Hollywood. Losing that host, TPB set sail for the east and soon came back online. Again.

However, the site’s enemies were already hatching another plan.

After TPB relocated some of its operations to Ukraine, in October Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN found another chink in the armor. Traffic to the site was routed through The Netherlands via Nforce, a LeaseWeb customer. Nforce quickly complied with BREIN’s threats, and The Pirate Bay went down yet again – very temporarily of course.

Then at the end of October the Stockholm District Court delivered what should’ve been a killer blow, banning Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site on pain of $71,000 in fines for non-compliance. But even this decision is proving toothless.

The Pirate Bay is no longer located in Sweden (and no longer runs a tracker), which causes a problem for the Swedish courts. As for the human flesh and bones included in the decision, they are proving just as elusive.

While both individuals are appealing the decision, both deny running the site anymore, having handed it over to others. Furthermore, Fredrik – aka TiAMO – lives in Thailand and has done for some time. Gottfrid – aka Anakata – can be found sleeping all day and operating his computers all night in the jungles of Cambodia. The locations of the pair clearly present a slight jurisdiction problem for the Swedish decision.

“I am wondering if Swedish law has the power to issue a prohibition or penalty against a website in another country and my adopted acts in another country with a website that does not exist in Sweden,” said Fredrik this week, commenting on the situation.

So, while the site is effectively banned in Sweden, it is not located in Sweden. However, because it no longer operates a tracker of its own it is much less responsible for the infringements of others than it was before. This potentially paves the way for the ban on the site to be lifted.

Furthermore, while the founders are banned from running the site in Sweden, they say they no longer run it. But in any event, neither of them live in Sweden.

In the meantime, the site remains up. Quite what the next move will be by the anti-piracy groups is open to speculation, but historically, one thing seems almost certain – The Pirate Bay will respond and refuse to be cowed.

One day it will disappear, of that there can be little doubt, but it will be at a time and a place of their choosing, not one dictated by their adversaries.

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Swedish ISP Black Internet Appeals Pirate Bay Shutdown Order Digital Media Wire Stockholm, Sweden – The Pirate Bay's former bandwidth supplier, Black Internet, has been given leave to appeal a Swedish court's order to disconnect the …

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Pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several entertainment companies against the site, in August the district court in Stockholm ordered The Pirate Bay to be disconnected from the Internet.

The site’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet, was told it would face penalties of 500,000 kronor ($70,600) if it failed to carry out the order of the court.

The company complied, but after initially deciding it would simply accept the decision, its management later changed their mind and said they would appeal. Unless they did so, they noted, the same kind of action could be taken against other sites and ISPs with possibly far-reaching implications.

“This is the first time in Sweden that an operator has been ordered to stop delivering Internet to someone. We want to know if it’s correct to do so,” said Black Internet CEO Victor Möller at the time.

The ISP has now been authorized to take the decision to the Court of Appeal, but unlike Black Internet had requested the earlier verdict remains intact until the Court of Appeal decided otherwise.

“This is such a fundamentally important issue as far as ISP responsibility goes,” said Victor Möller to SR.se. “It is not important for us if we can deliver bandwidth to The Pirate Bay or not – it is about the principle,” Möller concluded.

Although the case will set an important precedent for ISPs in Sweden, The Pirate Bay itself hardly suffered as the site simply switched to a new provider and returned within a few hours.

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In August the bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay was ordered by a court to disconnect the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker from the Internet.

Within hours the site had relocated to a new host, which immediately received similar threats. After periods of downtime, the Pirate Bay eventually regained stability in recent days.

Although these attempts failed, the authorities weren’t about to give up in their quest to shut down the site.

The Stockholm District Court has now ordered that two of the site’s founder members – Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij – are now banned from operating the site. Failure to comply with the court’s decision will result in fines of 500,000 kronor ($71,600) each.

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, who appears to be excluded from the decision, is notably annoyed, noting that neither the founders nor the site are located in Sweden.

“The Stockholm City Court is located in Stockholm. Stockholm is in Sweden. Swedish borders apply. Frederick and Godfrid live outside Sweden, even outside the EU. The Pirate Bay is outside the EU,” he told SR.

“How then can the Stockholm District Court, Sweden, get to decide that people abroad must not work on a site in another country?”

This is a breaking news story, to be updated

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At the end of August, Stockholm’s district court ordered Black Internet, the bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay, to disconnect the site from the Internet, pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several Hollywood entertainment companies.

The ISP had little choice but to comply or face large fines, but TPB was quick to react and quickly partnered with a new host.

That short honeymoon was quickly over.

“It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay,” commented Patrik from the ISP which had been indirectly supplying bandwidth to TPB.

Despite initially putting on a brave face and standing strong, Patrik’s company continued to feel the heat. It is not a large outfit and doesn’t have the resources to fight the entertainment industry and its threats.

Last night, Patrik could hold off no longer after receiving mounting threats from the entertainment industries, which culminated in threats of a court summons. Having come this far, there is little doubt that IFPI and the MPAA would litigate if necessary.

“I was threatened by the movie and music companies,” Patrik said today. He had no choice but to stop servicing TPB. His company cut off the site’s bandwidth last night but The Pirate Bay is fully operational, so they must’ve found another host. It’s likely that they already had one prepared.

With Sweden seemingly out of bounds, the site needed to move overseas. The Netherlands is not really an option anymore and the same goes for most of Western Europe – the solution lies in the east.

On the heels of several rumors today, Patrik said he could confirm news of the move, saying that he believes The Pirate Bay is now hosted in Ukraine.

There have been signs that this Eastern European nation is becoming an attractive location for torrent site hosting, with several large sites and services showing interest.

However, as illustrated by the on-going problems at Demonoid, TorrentFreak is told that the reliability can leave a lot to be desired, with sites having to take measures to ensure that when their Ukrainian hosting becomes unavailable, backup resources kick in.

The standard of Pirate Bay’s new home (if it is indeed in Ukraine) isn’t likely to reflect the comparative luxury of Sweden, but that door seems to be all but closed now. Whether the site stays in Ukraine is another question, but that aside, a simple one remains;

Would you host The Pirate Bay in Sweden? The answer will likely match the response to “Do you like lawsuits?”

Maybe the Swedish government’s nightmare is finally over.

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Last month Stockholm’s district court ordered action to disconnect The Pirate Bay from the Internet, pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several Hollywood entertainment companies.

Black Internet was forced to disconnect TPB from the Internet or face large financial penalties. While the ISP had little choice but to comply with the disconnection order, it was soon back online with a new ISP.

Yesterday Black Internet said it would appeal the decision of the Stockholm district court, stating that the decision goes much further than The Pirate Bay. “Either we sort this out now or we will sit here in a few years time and wonder where the Internet went,” said CEO Victor Moller.

The company is hoping that other ISPs will join it by contributing to Open Internet, a foundation “to promote freedom of expression on the Internet through advocacy and by paying the costs for parties that would otherwise find it difficult to pursue a lawsuit.”

One company that will sympathize with Black Internet and might consider becoming a supporter of Open Internet, is the new bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay.

“It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay,” said Patrik from an ISP connected to the new TPB bandwidth supplier.

Although Patrik knows the people behind The Pirate Bay, he is not a direct supplier of bandwidth to the site. He provides bandwidth to another company who in turn supplies it to TPB.

“She [representative from Hollywood] was bitching a bit and asked me to see if I would turn off the bandwidth directly, or receive a court order instead,” said Patrik.

Patrik went on to say that he is compliant with existing laws and as long as that is the case, he will continue to supply the bandwidth. But what if the new suppliers are targeted in the same way as Black Internet – will they fight?

“It depends on the possibilities,” says Patrik. “I am a small company so I do not have the resources to run for long, but there are certainly others who want to,” he says.

Anyone wishing to donate to the Open Internet fund which will help Black Internet and others to fight in future, can do so via PayPal to donations@openinternet.se.

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