Intellectual Property Law

Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay

By David Kravets

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site’s operators wrote.

Hollywood lawyers, however, claim that the Pirate Bay’s tracker is alive and well and still being used under a different domain, OpenBitTorrent — which was originally registered to Fredik Neij, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay.

Neij and three co-founders were convicted in Stockholm and sentenced to a year in jail each in April for facilitating copyright infringement while running The Pirate Bay. The site is a gateway to copyrighted movies, music, games and software, with 22 million registered users.

Wednesday’s development is the latest in a string of attempts by Hollywood and the Swedish government to try to shutter The Pirate Bay following the convictions. But The Bay has outrun court orders to shut down, while defeating efforts to force internet service hosts to black out the site.

A Stockholm court on Wednesday said an ISP called Parlane is not required to block OpenBittorent. The court said the ISP is not liable for any infringement the tracker may facilitate.

Hollywood’s attorney, Monique Wadsted, noted that the court did not rule on the studio’s allegations that OpenBitTorrent was a front for The Pirate Bay, a charge that’s still pending.

“The court has not touched on the link between the tracker and The Pirate Bay, and that all the .torrent files on The Pirate Bay include [OBT's] tracker as the default tracker,” she told Swedish media, according to TorrentFreak. “The day we checked, there were 550,000 works that file-sharers [could download] through the tracker.”

OpenBitTorrent denies it is a “side project” to The Pirate Bay, whose founders remain free pending appeal.

See Also:

• It’s Alive! Hollywood Claims Pirate Bay Tracker Lives
• Pirate Bay Retires World’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker
• Prosecution Alters Pirate Bay Charges in Bid to Win Conviction …
• Prosecution Drops Some Charges Against The Pirate Bay
• The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome
• Pirate Bay Future Uncertain After Operators Busted
• Swedish Retailer Pirates the Pirate Bay Logo

Full post as published by Threat Level on December 02, 2009 (boomark / email).