Posted: 10:22 AM ET

Gottfrid Svartholm, founder of the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay, may have been found guilty of collaborating to violate copyright law in April, but he is not giving up the fight.

Supporters of the web site 'The Pirate Bay' demonstrate in Stockholm, on April 18, 2009.

Svartholm and his three co-defendants, who were sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to media companies, immediately appealed the court's decision and vowed never to pay up, declaring, "Even if we had the money I would rather burn everything I owned and not even give them the final dust from the burning. Not even the ashes."

However, last week Svartholm may have reversed his decision regarding the fine and launched a Swedish site internet-avgift, 'internet-fee' in English. Though the site's actual creator is unknown, the domain name internetavgift.se was registered by "svarth3024-00001."

The new site encourages Pirate Bay supporters to send extremely small sums of money to Peter Danowsky’s law firm, which represented the music companies in the trial. The idea behind the "fundraiser" is to inundate the law firm with such a high volume of insignificant payments that processing all the donations actually would cost them money.

The Blog Pirate calls the plan a Distributed Denial of Dollars attack (DDo$) and compares it to the common, and illegal, hacker practice of using DDoS attacks to knock websites offline:

The plan is an away-from-keyboard DDoS attack. DDoS attacks involve hordes of users overloading a victim with Internet traffic, damaging their ability to provide services. Money, instead of Internet traffic is used in this case.

CNET investigates the viability of DDo$ and interviews lawyer Peter Danowsky about the attack:

The scheme may turn out to be expensive for Danowsky's firm–or at least that's what the tricksters hope. According to the bank's rules (PDF in Swedish) companies can receive up to 1,000 payments a year for free... However, according to the law, each transaction, free or not, has to be entered in the law firm's books, which implies a lot of manpower.

Can the Pirate Bay defendants actually use their supporters to overcome a court order, or is this just a revenge attack initiated by Internet dissidents who support online piracy?

Posted by: Wes Finley-Price -- CNN.com Webmaster

Filed under: file sharing  Internet  online news