The Channel Wire

July 31, 2009

Movies about pirates may be successful, but when it comes to illegal downloads, neither the Netherlands nor Hollywood are fans of The Pirate Bay.

A Netherlands court ruled Thursday in a lawsuit brought by Stichting Brein, a Netherlands-based organization of copyright-holding companies, that The Pirate Bay needs to make its service inaccessible in the Netherlands or face a fine of 30,000 Euros a day, up to 3 million Euros.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a group of Hollywood movie studios asked a Swedish civil court to halt The Pirate Bay from making copyrighted movies available for download.

These most recent legal proceedings follow a busy month for The Pirate Bay. On June 30, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing site was acquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB, a small Swedish software company, for about $7.8 million. The purchase of The Pirate Bay coincided with the launch of The Video Bay, the company's attempt to launch a video sharing site in the same vein as YouTube or Google Video.

Meanwhile, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde recently thumbed his nose at the legal proceedings taking place. Sunde told the BBC that despite the on-going legal woes of The Pirate Bay, he's on vacation, and that his site filed a complaint against the Motion Picture Association of America.

"The latest threats are just harassments from the industry of course. We've actually asked the courts to punish them with a high fine for the faulty threats," Sunde told the BBC.

Despite Sunde's apparent lack of concern for the legal proceedings taking place against The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent site appears to be a -- excuse the cliche -- sinking ship. The Web site, once an independent P2P haven for file sharering, has been acquired in an attempt to go legitimate. Hollywood has gotten tired of its content being ripped off and appears to be making an aggressive move against the site.

Like Napster before it, it seems almost inevitable that something will eventually go poorly for The Pirate Bay. And once a precedent-setting court decision rolls in, the BitTorrent site may have to drop the Jolly Rodger and run up the white flag.