Following the earlier court defeat for Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter and the pending civil action taken by several Hollywood studios, the Swedish authorities have now ordered The Pirate Bay to be disconnected from the Internet. The site's bandwidth suppliers have been threatened with a large fine. The site is completely offline.

Today, Stockholm’s district court took action to completely remove The Pirate Bay from the Internet.

The court ordered the site’s major bandwidth supplier, Black Internet, to disconnect TPB from the Internet or face penalties of 500,000 kroner ($70,600). The ISP complied, saying that it had no choice but to uphold the law.

The censorship of The Pirate Bay will continue pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party said: “This is absolutely ridiculous. The Court seems to consider themselves above the Constitution,” while criticizing the effect that these civil actions are having on freedom of speech. “This clarifies how copyright law has become untenable, and how information is lacking political skills in the judiciary,” he added.

Black Internet is probably not the only supplier of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, so it may be possible for them to reconnect to the Internet elsewhere. Whether or not another Swedish supplier would even consider doing that is seriously in doubt.

Update: As expected, The Pirate Bay site relocated and is back online (DNS still has to update for some people). A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they “got a new connection to the net.” The tracker is still down and is expected to be fully operational tomorrow morning, we were told. Ever since their servers were raided back in 2006 they were prepared for takedown attempts like this.

“The MAFIAA has spent millions of dollars and endless amounts of time to get this ban in order. Our guess is that they also bribed a bit to get it since it violates so many laws not only in Sweden but also in the EU, not to mention violations against human rights. And what do they have to show for it? 3 hours of partial downtime,” the Pirate Bay team adds.

The t-shirt below (currently the logo on the Pirate Bay homepage) will be sent to the people responsible for the takedown attempt tomorrow morning, the Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Another update: The temporary host has a problem with its fiber causing the site to go offline again. Meanwhile, the downtime is causing traffic spikes for other torrent sites and trackers.

And another update: The site is back online.