Pirate Bay supporters ram Swedish IFPI website

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has pleaded with fans to stop attacking official entertainment industry websites after the Swedish wing of the The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) site was hacked yesterday.

Sunde, who is among four men facing prosecutors representing the likes of Sony, MGM and Universal in the already infamous Pirate Bay trial, uncharacteristically put the boot in yesterday against the hackers.

“Our case is going quite well as most of you have noticed. In the light of that it feels very bad that people are hacking web sites which actually puts us in a worse light than we need to be in,” he said in a post on his “Copy Me Happy” blog.

“If anyone involved in the acts going on is reading this - please stop, for our sake. We don’t need that kind of support,” he added writing under his brokep moniker.

The trial underwent a dramatic turn of events on Tuesday when chief prosecutor Håkan Roswall scratched copyright infringement allegations against Sunde, Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg from the charge sheet.

Meanwhile, at time of writing, ifpi.se remains out of action as day four of the case gets underway in the Stockholm district court.

It had earlier carried the following message:

"The ruthless hunt conducted by the IFPI, Anti-Piracy Office, Warner Bros., and all the other companies with a pawn in the game has now resulted in a trial in which four innocent men are accused of copyright infringement.

"This is a declaration of war against anti-piracy outfits and the industry players behind them, and we urge the public to boycott and lynch those responsible. IFPI is just the beginning. To be Continued."

The self-titled group The New Generation (Den Nya Generationen) was behind the website hackery and claimed it had attacked the website to show support of the defendants in the case.

According to Sunde, IFPI's official Swedish website was not the only address targeted by internet intruders. He claimed hackers also gained access to ifpi.org and Sunde’s old domain ifpi.com, where a sneering broadside against the entertainment industry was displayed.

An IFPI spokesman confirmed to us today that the Swedish site had indeed been hacked but claimed that both ifpi.org and ifpi.com had simply been hit by denial of service attacks.

IFPI's Sweden MD Lars Gustafsson lambasted the hackers motives. He told The Register: "It is deplorable that these saboteurs will go to such extremes as to infringe on our and others' freedom of speech on the internet."

Swedish news site The Local, has full coverage of the latest developments in the case here. ®