The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.
A few days ago we exclusively revealed that several major Hollywood movie studios had obtained a preliminary injunction against CyberBunker operator CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG from the Regional Court of Hamburg.The injunction, which was granted without an oral hearing, stated that CB3ROB and Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis were now prohibited from connecting The Pirate Bay website and its servers to the Internet.
yesterday Kamphuis officially confirmed receiving the injunction and has decided to stop routing The Pirate Bay’s traffic until his lawyers have carefully read and reviewed the legal documents. This decision has resulted in downtime for the world’s largest BitTorrent site.
A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they are not planning to wait for a decision from the Cyberbunker team, and that they’ve already set the backup process in motion which will bring the site back online. The Pirate Bay’s servers are untouched and getting the site up and running only requires the routing to go through another provider.
It may take several hours before this process has been completed and before all ISPs see the new AS-path. TorrentFreak was assured, however, that things will return to normal as soon as possible.
Ever since The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided back in 2006, the operators of the site have taken extreme measures to ensure that there are proper backup mechanisms in place and that the locations of the servers are well concealed. Where the servers are actually located remains a mystery.
@'TorrentFreak'
Also
The jurisdiction of the German courts over CB3ROB's servers is also questionable. Although Kamphuis's company is based in Berlin, it is very much linked to the Cyberbunker server operation which is actually based in the Netherlands. Although the Hamburg court can fine and try to imprison Kamphuis, it is likely the Bay is actually physically hosted in the Netherlands, out of the reach of any German judges if they decided to order servers be seized.
Even if the Dutch courts were willing to make such orders, any legal action involving the Cyberbunker set up would be complicated, mainly because the owner of the former NATO bunker in which the firm's servers are stored has declared the site an independent state not under Dutch jurisdiction, I think on the basis that the Netherlands never formally repatriated the site after it stopped being used by NATO.
Cyberbunker's owner Herman Johan Xennt says he is King of the site, while the aforementioned Kamphuis is listed as the 'country's' Minister Of Foreign Affairs & Telecommunications. While the independence of the site is a bit of a fantasy, it would mean any legal action against the server firm through the Dutch courts would touch on constitutional as well as copyright issues. And given Cyberbunker's staff-list-come-government also includes a Minister Of Warfare, it might be that any attempt to raid the server site could turn violent.
All of which is familiar territory for those who have been following the Bay story closely. In 2007, the then top team at the Bay looked into buying Sealand, the former military platform off the British coast of unclear constitutional status, with the idea of basing the piracy service there, putting it outside the jurisdiction of any courts.
@'CMU'
Also
The jurisdiction of the German courts over CB3ROB's servers is also questionable. Although Kamphuis's company is based in Berlin, it is very much linked to the Cyberbunker server operation which is actually based in the Netherlands. Although the Hamburg court can fine and try to imprison Kamphuis, it is likely the Bay is actually physically hosted in the Netherlands, out of the reach of any German judges if they decided to order servers be seized.
Even if the Dutch courts were willing to make such orders, any legal action involving the Cyberbunker set up would be complicated, mainly because the owner of the former NATO bunker in which the firm's servers are stored has declared the site an independent state not under Dutch jurisdiction, I think on the basis that the Netherlands never formally repatriated the site after it stopped being used by NATO.
Cyberbunker's owner Herman Johan Xennt says he is King of the site, while the aforementioned Kamphuis is listed as the 'country's' Minister Of Foreign Affairs & Telecommunications. While the independence of the site is a bit of a fantasy, it would mean any legal action against the server firm through the Dutch courts would touch on constitutional as well as copyright issues. And given Cyberbunker's staff-list-come-government also includes a Minister Of Warfare, it might be that any attempt to raid the server site could turn violent.
All of which is familiar territory for those who have been following the Bay story closely. In 2007, the then top team at the Bay looked into buying Sealand, the former military platform off the British coast of unclear constitutional status, with the idea of basing the piracy service there, putting it outside the jurisdiction of any courts.
@'CMU'
