The Pirate Bay In Troubled Waters After Court Ruling

The Pirate Bay peer-to-peer file-sharing Web site appears to be sinking fast as a Swedish court is pulling the plug on the local ISP hosting the site and the chairman of the company purchasing The Pirate Bay is leaving amid reports the company lacks the funds to close the acquisition.

The co-founders of The Pirate Bay in April were sentenced to a year in prison and fined about $3.6 million in damages for providing a means of downloading content such as video and music files without compensating the copyright owners.

The Pirate Bay late last month was successfully sued in the Netherlands, and a Dutch court told the company to find a way to make sure its technology is not accessible in that country.

The Swedish Wire, an online site devoted to business and finance news from Sweden, reported on Monday that Stockholm's district court ordered bandwidth supplier Black Internet to shut down the bandwidth for The Pirate Bay or face a $70,000 penalty.

However, other bandwidth providers may step in to replace Black Internet, the site reported.

Meanwhile, the Web site TorrentFreak reported on Monday that The Pirate Bay has already made arrangements to be back online thanks to the help of alternative bandwidth suppliers. The site is expected to be fully operational on Tuesday, TorrentFreak reported.

At the same time, troubles are rocking the waters at Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), which in June said it planned to acquire The Pirate Bay, along with its domain names and related Web sites, for about $7.7 million in cash and stock.

GGF Chairman Magnus Bergman last week said he was stepping down from his position in the wake of financial scandal involving GGF's CEO and whether the company actually received an investment bid of $10 million from John Fanning, founder of Napster, the Swedish Wire reported.

As a result, trading of GGF's stock was halted Friday, the Swedish Wire reported.