The Pirate Bay returned to the business of providing its BitTorrent technology to freetards earlier today with a new bandwidth supplier in the unlikely form of the Swedish Pirate Party, after the site was offline for the best part of a day.

The Pirate Party’s Rick Falkvinge said in a statement this lunchtime that his anti-copyright outfit was the new host of TPB’s homepage and search engine.

German ISP CB3ROB (Cyberbunker) - which had been the previous bandwidth provider - was slapped with an injunction in the Hamburg district court last week. Unsurprisingly, TPB went offline yesterday after Cyberbunker complied with the court order.

That particular company had been threatened with hefty fines and prison sentences if it ignored the court's demands.

TPB periodically dies on its arse each time one of its bandwidth hosts is dragged through various courts in Europe.

Now, the Swedish Pirate Party has taken over hosting of TPB’s homepage and search engine by telling The Register it was “the last link in the chain” to keep the infamous BitTorrent tracker website ticking over.

"Compared to what we already provide to activists around the world, this is completely within our budget and isn’t going to strike us financially," the Pirate Party's Rick Falkvinge told El Reg.

"Our IT department has confirmed it’s within our bandwidth budget, and that’s all I care about."

However, Falkvinge would not tell us how much money his party was spending on the operation and was vague about the technology underpinning its bandwidth service.

"We’re not running the servers as such; we’re just the last link in the chain," he said before confusingly adding: "We are the Pirate Bay’s ISP for the homepage and search engine but not for the other parts of the site."

Falkvinge declined to comment on who was hosting the rest of the website.

"We don’t see no reason to end this bandwidth arrangement," he said and confirmed that there was currently about 400,000 Swedish kronor in the party's kitty and 20,075 members signed up to the anti-copyright cause.

The party spokesman was also bullish - or deluded - about Sweden's upcomimg election on 19 September.

"The instant we are in Parliament we are going to rewrite the rules," proclaimed Falkvinge.

He told us that the Swedish Pirate Party's servers were located in a former Cold War bunker set deep within Stockholm, and when pushed he also admitted that the outfit was "signed up to several ISPs" in the country.

"We run the [Pirate Party's website's] location in the mountain, but apart from that we buy bandwidth from several other ISPs," said Falkvinge.

He refused to tell the Reg which ISPs the party was buying its bandwidth from but did confirm it currently has two of them on the books.

So presumably if the entertainment industry pursues the Pirate Party's ISP then The Pirate Bay could once again be knocked overboard. ®