Pirate Bay files criminal complaint against media giants

The Pirate Bay is a file-sharing hub for torrents which the music and film industry claims is used to share copyrighted material without permission on a massive scale. The site is affiliated with The Pirate Party, a Swedish political party which calls for the legalising of file-sharing.

The Pirate Bay's complaint relates to activity by MediaDefender, a firm hired by media companies to disrupt file-sharing activity and report on what material is being shared.

The Pirate Bay says that the company's activities amount to illegal hacking and spamming. It has filed a criminal complaint against the entertainment companies themselves, including Twentieth Century Fox, EMI, Universal, Paramount and Sony BMG.

"We now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers," said a Pirate Bay statement. 'Ddosers' refers to those who launch distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.

The potential evidence comes from a series of leaked emails between Media Defender and the entertainment firms which Pirate Bay says prove that there has been illegal activity.

"While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police," it said. "The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level."

MediaDefender was said to be putting fake files online pretending to be songs, and to be seeding networks with corrupted files to foil sharers. It had greater trouble disrupting torrent networks than other kinds of network, though, and recent reports have emerged claiming that its clients are not satisfied with its performance.

The Pirate Bay claims that it is legal in Sweden because it is simply a search engine for torrent files and does not itself distribute copyrighted material. Sweden has a history of more lax intellectual property laws than other countries in Europe.

The Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay in May 2006 in a move widely seen in that country as representing political appeasement to the US, which had lobbied the Government to act against The Pirate Bay. No charges have been filed in relation to the raid. Charges must be filed before a deadline of 1st October.