Last year, The Pirate Bay moved to an ISP that has facilities located in a former NATO nuclear bunker. It has operated with them successfully for some time but we can now reveal that Hollywood movie studios are threatening the ISP with a legal strike over its servicing of TPB and several other sites. The ISP's owner, however, is in no mood to capitulate.

In early October 2009, The Pirate Bay was forced to move outside its native Sweden and find a new host in Ukraine. Their stay in Eastern Europe didn’t last long though, and soon they found a new and fairly unorthodox home.

CyberBunker is a former nuclear warfare bunker in The Netherlands. The facility was built by NATO in the 1950s and was designed to survive a nuclear war. After that threat largely subsided the bunker changed owners and is now believed to be used as a webhosting data center and is the presumed (in reality this is almost impossible to prove) home of The Pirate Bay.

CyberBunker: Threatened With MPA Strike

At the time, Sven Kamphuis, one of the owners of CB3ROB/Cyberbunker, said there were initial difficulties with setting up The Pirate Bay in its new location. Several carriers refused to assist following threats from local anti-piracy group, BREIN. Those problems were soon overcome but although The Pirate Bay continued to function and even grow, we can now exclusively reveal that there are turbulent seas ahead.

According to detailed information received by TorrentFreak, Disney Enterprises and Paramount Pictures in association with Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. (known collectively as the MPA) have been threatening CB3ROB Ltd with legal action over their hosting of The Pirate Bay and several other prominent movie-related sites.

Via its lawyers, in November 2009 the MPA sent CB3ROB a written “copyright warning” which stated that its members own the exclusive rights to a list of movies. The MPA further noted that CB3ROB is the Internet service provider for not only The Pirate Bay, but also movie streaming giants including Watch-Movies-Online.tv, Movie2K.com, TVShack.net, NovaMov.com and MovShare.com. Those sites, they say, are infringing their exclusive rights.

The complaint went on to detail the mechanics of The Pirate Bay, the guilty verdict delivered to its operators in a Swedish court in 2009 and the injunction placed on the site in the Amsterdam District Court in October the same year. Information on the nature of the streaming sites detailed above was also included.

The MPA warning then went on to suggest that since CB3ROB are aware that The Pirate Bay and the other sites are infringing, it is their responsibility to ensure that those infringements stop – i.e, bring an end to providing them with hosting and bandwidth or, as appears to be the case with The Pirate Bay, filter out torrents relating to MPA member works. Failure to do so would result in the MPA taking CB3ROB to court in Germany.

A very tight deadline of a few days was set for a CB3ROB respond, which appears to have been adhered to. The response, however, was not what the MPA had hoped for.

Through their lawyers, CB3ROB rejected the claims of the MPA on several grounds including what they term as an incorrect description of The Pirate Bay’s business model.

As readers will remember, last year the site “went magnetic” by dumping its tracker and relying on DHT and PEX instead. Therefore, CB3ROB argued, the rulings against TPB in Sweden and The Netherlands related to a time when the site’s operations were conducted in a different manner. The complaint is further rejected on grounds that as an ISP, CB3ROB aren’t responsible for the activities of its customers.

TorrentFreak spoke with Sven Olaf Kamphuis from CB3ROB who confirmed our information is correct.

“Once again [Disney] tried to infringe upon the right to provider immunity and the concept of net neutrality by claiming that by providing the Pirate Bay (and others) with Internet connectivity we (CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG) would be ‘assisting them in engaging in copyright violations’, which, should our customers be doing that, remains to be proven in court anyway,” he told us.

“They tried this (as usual) by means of an injunction, which we have had our attorneys block by means of a schutzbrief sent to all courts, basically saying they can’t get an injunction without going through the usual court case process,” he added.

Kamphuis says that he believes German law is quite specific in granting provider immunity, with data communications receiving protection under the law in pretty much the same way as postal mail. He explained:

“Providers are immune to any liability claims as long as they:

1: Don’t initiate the transfer of data (which we don’t, the user’s browser does)

2: Don’t select the addressees (IP addresses in this case) of the information to be transferred (Which we don’t, even Disney is free to use the PirateBay as far as we’re concerned ;) )

3: Don’t modify or select the information to be transferred (which we don’t)”

Kamphuis told TorrentFreak that if Disney and friends have a problem with the activities of CB3ROB clients, they should start a court case against them, a route he notes that has been traveled before, without success.

“If they’re too lazy (or don’t have valid arguments) to win court cases against individual parties and force them to terminate their activities, that cannot and will not be made the problem of the Internet industry, we simply cannot tolerate that,” he insists. “They’re trying to blackmail ISPs into cleaning up the mess caused by their dysfunctional business model, which the Internet industry, of course, will not do.”

The information we received detailing CB3ROB’s rejection of the Swedish and Dutch decisions was also confirmed.

“Disney apparently also can’t read Dutch, nor Swedish, as all court verdicts so far are for the Pirate Bay WITH torrent trackers, which they seem to keep messing up with torrent-files. It would help if they would pick some attorneys to represent them who at the very minimum know what they’re talking about, and stop babbling nonsense.”

Kamphuis insists that his company will accept anyone as a customer who can pay the bills and they will do everything required to deliver Internet connectivity to them – period. As an ISP, he says, they provide this service indiscriminately, “..but you know what,” he adds, “I’ve got a great idea.”

“Why don’t all ISPs just give them what they want and drop all packets that contain the word ‘Disney’ from them, including the ones from and to -their- websites, let’s see how long they last without using OUR internet for promoting and selling their shitty crap,” he concludes.