This week the Swedish Pirate Party and one of its bandwidth suppliers were told that they must stop servicing The Pirate Bay or face legal action. It now appears similar threats were extended to Portlane, another Internet provider even further up the connectivity supply chain. TorrentFreak has learned that in a move designed to protect Portlane, The Pirate Bay is no longer utilizing bandwidth from this provider. This shows that even if Portlane had complied, the site would have remained online.

In 2010 after Hollywood studios obtained injunctions against the site’s former hosting providers, The Pirate Bay turned to the Swedish Pirate Party for support.

The party, which has long stood for the same free sharing of information ideals as The Pirate Bay, agreed to begin supplying bandwidth to the site. For three years the arrangement went along just fine, but now there is a serious challenge to the status quo.

This Tuesday the Pirate Party announced that they had received legal threats from the Swedish Rights Alliance. Stop serving TPB with Internet connectivity, they ordered, or face legal action in a week. But can the party be held liable as a traditional host might?

Yesterday, in an attempt to illustrate the relationship the party has with the site, former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde described the technical setup and how it differs from a regular hosting arrangement.

“There is no question of the Pirate Party being a final destination for The Pirate Bay, but rather a stretch of road. [The party’s systems] store no data, there is no data in them. Everything is in cables only temporarily,” he wrote.

But despite the technical differences between hosting and simply pushing data around, the threats from Rights Alliance persist.

Serious Tubes, the company that sells bandwidth to the Pirate Party, also received similar threats from Rights Alliance. They were ordered to stop providing bandwidth to the Pirate Party and must now consider their position and reveal their intentions by next Tuesday, February 26.

But not content with moving at least two steps up the bandwidth chain with legal threats, new information has revealed that Rights Alliance have taken things even further by threatening to sue Portlane, the Swedish Internet provider that supplies Serious Tubes with bandwidth.

To underline just how detached this situation has become, picture this. The Pirate Bay (hosted who-knows-where) is connected directly (or maybe indirectly) to the Pirate Party. In turn the party are connected to Serious Tubes, who in turn are connected to Portlane. So what we have here is the supplier of the supplier of the supplier of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay coming under legal threat. That’s quite a chain.

Nevertheless, indications are that the long chain of intermediaries, all of which act as “mere conduits” as far as Internet connectivity is concerned, are taking the threats fairly seriously.

A little while ago Cluez, a member of the Pirate Party’s admin group, told TorrentFreak via party founder Rick Falkvinge that Portlane are no longer involved in the supply chain to Pirate Bay.

“Serious Tubes routed past Portlane on their own initiative, because of a threat against Portlane, as to not put Portlane in unnecessary trouble,” he confirmed.

But before readers begin frantically opening new tabs to check that The Pirate Bay is still alive, rest assured that panic is not required. Measures are already in place to safeguard the site’s uptime.

“Obviously, Serious Tubes (and Pirate Party) are now getting their bandwidth from elsewhere,” comments Rasmus Fleischer, one of the founders of Piratbyrån, the group that founded The Pirate Bay.

“No one should think that TPB will stand or fall solely with the Pirate Party supply.”

It’s clear that The Pirate Bay are well prepared for these kinds of attacks on their infrastructure, as the lack of downtime shows. Furthermore, when their entire site can be squeezed onto the smallest of USB sticks, reappearance in new locations is possible in a matter of minutes.

TorrentFreak contacted Portlane for an official comment but we are yet to receive a response.