Why did lawyers for a bank in the Cayman Islands ask a judge in essence to turn off the domain name of the Wikileaks site? Perhaps because they could not get the site shut down by more traditional means.

Companies that believe they have some reason to have something taken off the Web routinely have their lawyers fire off letters to the Web hosting company of the site in question. In this case, Julius Baer Bank was interested in removing some of its internal documents that had ended up on Wikileaks, a site that exists to publish documents that someone would rather not see published. But Wikileaks had clearly planned ahead for this sort of thing. The records for the site’s I.P. address indicate that it is hosted by PRQ, based in Stockholm. PRQ’s home page offers clues that it’s not just another hosting company. It paraphrases a quote from Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “I worry about my children all the time. I worry that 10 years from now, they will come to me and say, ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of speech away from the Internet?'”

As it turns out, PRQ is owned by two founders of the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker site that is Hollywood’s least favorite online destination. The Pirate Bay guys have made a sport out of taunting all forms of authority, including the Swedish police, and PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies wouldn’t touch. It is perhaps the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company and thus a perfect home for Wikileaks, which says it is “developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.”

The bank’s lawyers may have asked PRQ to remove the documents and been laughed at, or they may have learned a little bit about the company and decided not to waste their time. (The lawyers are not responding to requests for comment, and PRQ has not replied to an e-mail query.)

The weak link for Wikileaks turned out to be Dynadot, the registrar for its domain name, based in San Mateo, Calif. In an innovative move, the bank got a judge to have Dynadot change the records for wikileaks.org so it would no longer direct Web surfers to the server in Sweden. This is a little like getting someone taken out of the phone book. But this being the Internet, people found other ways to get the number out there.

2/28 UPDATE: Gottfrid Svartholm of PRQ says in the comments: “We haven’t received anything from BJB. I can’t comment on more than that regarding individual customers though – we have very strict confidentiality policies in place.”

This seems to contradict a line in an article in The Register on the case last week.

Privacy and civil rights groups filed a motion in the case this week, and there will be a hearing on Friday in San Francisco.