The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker, was unavailable Monday after a court ordered a leading Swedish ISP to block access. But some users were able to reach the site again just hours later.

The order by a Swedish district court came months after the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay (where copyrighted movies, games, software and music can be found for free) were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement and ordered jailed a year each pending an appeal.

After the April trial in Stockholm, the Hollywood movie studios urged the court to close The Pirate Bay. They did so early Monday ... or tried.

A few hours after the block was enacted, former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde encouraged users to refresh their DNS cache to get a new internet IP address for the Bay.

Some users reported success at the new address, which is registered to DCP Networks, a company owned by convicted Pirate Bay financier Frederick Neij. But by 2:30 eastern time, it too was unreachable by Threat Level, as was the company website. A cat-and-mouse game appears to be unfolding.

Sunde puts his money on the mouse. Or is that the cat? Anyway, he says the Pirate Bay will prevail.

"Some of the most talented network people in the world have been working with the site, with a tremendous threat from the most corrupt and powerful corporations in the world," Sunde wrote in an e-mail. "A plan B (and C, D, E and F) is always in existence."

The developments were days ahead of the potential sale of the site to Global Gaming Factory, which was to transform it into a pay-to-play venue for content. None of the major content providers, however, have announced a licensing deal.

UPDATE:

Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factory, is apparently unfazed by the court-ordered outage of a website he's about to pay $8.5 million to aquire.

"It doesn't concern me actually," Pandeya told Threat Level on Monday. "But I don't want to tell you why."

Shareholders are expected to vote on the deal Thursday. Pandeya and the company's board control a majority of the company's stock, and Pandeya says he still expects the sale to go through.

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