Did The Pirate Bay really shutter its tracker, as claimed on Tuesday?

The Motion Picture Association doesn't think so.

Hollywood's overseas lobbying organization claims OpenBitTorrent, billed as an independent "open tracker project," was actually established by one of The Pirate Bay's founders.

"OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay," Hollywood attorney Monique Wadsted told Swedish media.

Wadsted, TorrentFreak notes, said the tracker's domain was originally registered by Fredrik Neij, one of the four Pirate Bay co-founders.

On its website, OpenBitTorrent denies it's The Pirate Bay's tracker:

OpenBitTorrent has been mixed up as being a part of and/or a side project to The Pirate Bay. The reason for this is that during the startup period during February through August of 2009, we shared the same hosting company and to some extent used the same tracker cluster and IP-address space provided by DCP Networks, the same service provider as The Pirate Bay used. OpenBitTorrent was at the time a customer of DCP Networks and Fredrik Neij, one of their employees but also one of the founders of The Pirate Bay.

The MPA has gone to court, trying to get OpenBitTorrent's internet host, Portlane of Sweden, to stop servicing the tracker.

Hollywood's allegations come a day after The Pirate Bay announced it was retiring the world's largest BitTorrent tracker, and opting to serve up free movies, software, games and music via DHT and PEX technologies that allow peers to locate one another without accessing a central server.

All the while, the Swedish press speculated Tuesday that the tracker's retirement might be related to an October decision by a court in that country requiring the The Pirate Bay to either shut down or remove all unauthorized copyright works. The Stockholm district court said two of the site’s four co-founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Neij, would be fined up to $73,000 if they failed to comply.

Pending appeal, The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders each face a year in prison and millions in fines after their April convictions in a Stockholm court for facilitating copyright infringement.

On appeal, Svartholm Warg argued that the proposed $73,000 fine should be nullified if the tracker was shut down, according to Swedish media.

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