Pirate Bay sues media giants for 'sabotage'

Counterstrike follows Media Defender email leak

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Law, 24th September 2007 11:00 GMT

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The Pirate Bay has filed a criminal complaint against entertainment firms over alleged attacks against the controversial file sharing tracker site.

A police complaint against the Swedish subsidiaries of music and movie studios follows a leak of embarassing emails from MediaDefender, the firm allegedly hired by media moguls to disrupt Pirate Bay's operations.

These attacks included "infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking, and spamming", Pirate Bay alleges.

Internal mails from MediaDefender detailing, among others, plans to pollute file sharing networks and to set up fake file sharing sites in a bid to infect users with spyware, ironically appeared on file sharing networks earlier this month.

The 700MB of leaked company emails also provide evidence of MediaDefender's collaboration with the New York Attorney General's office on a secret law enforcement project.

"Thanks to the email leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders 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," Pirate Bay said.

It's unclear whether the leaked emails are admissible under Swedish law, much less whether media firms will be able to come up with any sort of counter-attack or defence. Either way, the case is likely to be well worth watching. ®

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