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.
