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Pirate Bay sinks under electric storm

Website goes titsup day after Dutch court verdict

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The Pirate Bay website has been knocked offline due to what it claims to be a power failure.

On Monday a Dutch court temporarily banned the infamous BitTorrent tracker site's activities in the Netherlands, following legal action brought by the pro-copyright lobby outfit Stichting Brein in late July.

A judge ordered TPB's operators, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, to "cease infringing the copyright of the members" of the group, which represents the Dutch recording industry.

The three men were reportedly told to immediately shutter the service in the Netherlands or face a daily fine of €30,000, or up to €3m, during an interdict that was set to last for the next two months.

However, Brein agreed to suspend the fine for the month of August to give TPB time to reopen the case, after its founders said they would dispute the verdict.

Meanwhile, at time of writing thepiratebay.org website remains out of action.

Pirate Bay down

"ETA: 19:00 CET. Something is broken, we are working on it, check back in a little while!," reads a statement on the site.

A later update added: "Ok, we have some pwr FAIL. It's not BREIN FAIL."

The outfit's "ex-mouth piece" Sunde, AKA BrokeP, is still vocal enough to proclaim on his Twitter account that "TPB is moving, as it does once in a while," hence the current downtime.

Last month Global Gaming Factory X AB said it hoped to acquire TPB by 27 August this year. In June the Swedish company announced it had agreed to buy the site for $7.7m.

If that sale goes through the entertainment industry has recently made noises about its intentions to get GGF to stump up any cash it pays to buy the site. ®

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Latest Comments

What annoys me....

What annoys me is these whining music and movie companies saying they have lost tons and tons of money. They haven't lost anything, it's just money they haven't made. They talk about it like it's money they are entitled to, regardless of if the product is good or not. "we made this so give us your money"

How long have things like napster, kazaa, bit torrent etc etc etc been around now ? must be at least ten years. If all these companies keep "losing" as much money as they say, then why arent they all bankrupt now ?

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@ AC 16:42

Let he who is innocent cast the first stone.

I'm fully in support of pirates being fined for the legal infraction, about $100 and restitution of the value of the work stolen (about $1 USD per MP3), so long as everyone else is held accountable for each instance (not just when caught as it is now but EVERY time) of speeding, jaywalking, and the myriad ways you can blow you nose and break some IP law at the same time.

Who without an agenda whines about teenagers sharing MP3s when you can go on any major road and see people arguably risking others' lives by the simple act of speeding, let alone the more serious ills in this world.

To focus on trivial things is to deliberately ignore the worst evils in this world, which when you get down to it is part of the problem in the first place. Musicians used to play captive for a private audience or what the public chose to pay after hearing them, there was always the option for that musician to find another line of work and the same is true today if they don't accept the pay for the job. Same with anyone else in the entertainment or content industry, we are not holding a gun to their heads and forcing their method of income.

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Anonymous Coward

Every criminal in prison is innocent

Just like the lies that pirates tell themselves, every criminal in prison is innocent. Denial don't change reality or the law. Get use to it or you'll be spending a lot of time at the iron bar hotel.

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