After a German injunction took out its ISP, The Pirate Bay went dark yesterday. Today, it's back up. Just another round of Whac-A-Mole? Yes, but this time the game got more serious: Sweden's Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), a legitimate political party with two members in the European Parliament, has taken on direct responsibility for hosting the site.

"When other politicians appoint committees and try to pass the buck, the Pirate Party instead takes responsibility and acts with its own resources to protect the nation’s information safety and fundamental freedom of speech. We are now The Pirate Bay’s Internet service provider," said Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge.

This sounds principled—noble even. The Pirate Party goes on to say that "the proposals to censor The Pirate Bay from the Internet [are] an attempt to silence one of today’s most important voices related to civil liberties and freedom on the net. It is nothing less than political censorship, which every democratically minded person must condemn."

Enter Dr. Lolcat

If you're a Pirate Bay administrator, however, here's how you sum up all the high-minded talk about censorship, free speech, and democracy:

LOL! AS U MITE HAS READ OR NOTICD, PEEPS ONCE AGAIN R TRYIN 2 SHUT US DOWN. DIS WILL NOT SUCCED, LOL. OURS RLY NICE WEBHOST WUZ THREATEND WIF RLY HUGE FINE, SO WE DECIDD 2 MOOV TEH SIET SO DAT THEY DIDNT GOT INTO TROUBLE, LOL. TEH DECISHUN 2 MOOV WUZ TAKEN BY US, TEH PIRATE BAY, LOL. TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4 AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX. TPB, ONLY IN IT 4 TEH LULZ SINCE 2003.

Are they in it "4 the lulz," or for democracy? A set of bolded letters in the all-caps blog post gave us an answer: "ASSCLOWNS OV TEH RIAA." The post was authored by one "Dr. LOLCAT."

The Pirate Party's decision to host the site poses a direct challenge to the Swedish legal system, which has already found the site operators guilty of copyright infringement (an appeal will be heard later this year). Christian Engström, the first Pirate MEP sent to Brussels, wants to alter the legal structure of copyright Europe-wide, and this move will certainly raise the question more urgently in the Swedish press.

"Limiting file sharing with laws and punishments doesn’t work," wrote Engström recently. "More of the same won’t either. File sharing is here to stay, like it or not. We should keep copyright, but limit it to when there is commercial intent. All noncommercial copying and use, such as file sharing, should be legalized... What the society has been doing so far isn’t working. There is no way to stop file sharing. It’s time we tried something else."

He believes that people will always spend the same amount of money on entertainment, and the file-sharing doesn't reduce this pool of money. Instead, it merely shuffles it around, away from plastic discs and toward live music, for instance. Copyright should only cover "commercial" use.

"All it takes is the political momentum to get things moving," he wrote. "I am hoping that we can build that momentum in the European Parliament. I think it can be done."

Ways to comply



The record labels aren't so keen on this approach, and they have traveled across Europe grabbing injunctions against ISPs, against BitTorrent search engines like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and against The Pirate Bay's own hosting services. This week, they secured such an injunction against Cyberbunker, a German ISP that was hosting The Pirate Bay's front page (the trackers are hosted elsewhere).

The first page of the injunction

While Sven Olaf Kamphuis, the man who runs Cyberbunker, has unabashed sympathies for the Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay, he was facing fines of €250,000 per infringement and possible jail time as long as he kept hosting the site. Despite his desire to fight, Kamphuis had no real choice but to honor the injunction.

"Yes, we did [take down the site]," he told Ars, "as it is a legally valid prohibition for us to provide Internet for the servers of The Pirate Bay as long as there are torrent files on it for those six movies."

According to the injunction from a Hamburg court, the six films referenced by Kamphuis are: The Bounty Hunter, Alice in Wonderland, Our Family Wedding, Green Zone, Repo Men, and Cop Out. These were the films cited by the studios in their complaint to the court.

Kamphuis told us The Pirate Bay faced three options. First was the choice to remove all torrent files from the site and use magnet links, which don't require a tracker. This is "not desirable as a lot of clients still require .torrent files."

Second, the site could filter out those six particular film names from its index, but this "could lead to the movie torrent files still being available under a misspelled name."

Finally, The Pirate Bay could get another ISP. "They are working on it as we speak," said Kamphuis.

He was right. Though the site still conceals the location of its servers, it has now returned to Sweden for its connection to the Internet, and The Pirate Party has decided to get involved.