The Pirate Bay Sued By Finnish Record Labels

The largest BitTorrent tracker site in the world The Pirate Bay has been sued again. Now the plaintiffs are more than twenty record labels from Finland, desperately attempting to halt piracy in their country. The petition to block The Pirate Bay was sent by the country's Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center on behalf of the IFPI.

Finnish pro-copyright outfit, which claims its goal is to ensure favorable operational conditions for the recording industry in the country, represents 23 record labels that launched a lawsuit at the Helsinki District Court. Like other similar outfits, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in Finland required the court to order telecommunications company called Elisa to deny access to a popular Swedish site providing Internet users with access to copyrighted content like music, films, and other material. The representative of the IFPI claimed that a legitimate online market can’t develop in country if infringing services like The Pirate Bay are allowed to go on with their operations.

In response, the Internet service provider argued that it doesn't condone piracy in the Internet, and refused to block access to The Pirate Bay unless the court orders it to do so.

Founded 8 years ago, the BitTorrent tracker allows millions of people to share copyrighted content through BitTorrent technology, or P2P links offered on the website. Two years ago, the website founders were fined and sentenced to prison for copyright infringement, but The Pirate Bay is still operational. However, the members of the service are still being pursued.

For example, recently the Denmark judge ruled that the website member nicknamed Icenfire should pay over $35,000 in damages for movie upload. The movie in question was Anders Matthesen’s comedy of 2009, “Black balls”, which was released on Blu-ray in the country, but the United States and Canada never saw the movie in the stores. The fine included the cost of the violation itself ($28,000) and associated court costs ($7,500). The individual was singled out by a Danish pro-copyright group, which claimed he was the original uploader. The outfit had raided his home in Denmark back in February, right after the routine analysis revealed the unauthorized upload

The Pirate Bay Launched Threatening Site

The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay is known for being a thorn in the side of the entertainment industry for a while. Nevertheless, it hinted that things still can take a turn for the worse. The matter is a new project launched by the TPB crew, titled “The Music Bay”, and promising that the music industry now has a great reason to be very, very afraid.

First of all, it was several years ago that The Pirate Bay registered a domain which hasn’t been very active thus far – themusicbay.org. Actually, when it was launched, there were plans to develop the most efficient music-sharing software ever. However, the plans were put aside because some other projects were more important.

Nevertheless, the domain didn’t fall into oblivion, as recently rumors started to circle that this domain name might be put to use after all. Although at the moment it is setup to serve ads for TPB site, as soon as this spring The Music Bay could be hosting a great surprise for the entertainment industry.

For example, the currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is now containing a hint that something is “coming soon”. However, The Pirate Bay operators are reluctant to reveal any specific details about the site. At the same time, their intentions are quite obvious, considering their words related to the record labels. Precisely, they said that the industry can’t even imagine what is going to be rolled out in the near future. Although the industry has been complaining bitterly about piracy for years, now they have a real reason to be scared. The only thing The Pirate Bay crew released is that “it is going to be a special surprise for the IFPI’s birthday”. Perhaps, even a festival will be organized in Rome, where IFPI was born. IFPI, by the way, is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, founded under Italian fascist government of Benito Mussolini in April of 1933.

No more details have been released by The Pirate Bay, so it will be not just a big surprise for the music industry, but for everyone, including us. As for now, all the rumors and comments can be interpreted in many ways – without any information on the oncoming project, it can only be treated now as a mere domain name, registered and used for the sole purpose of threatening the already paranoid record labels.