Pirates to sue music industry

A notorious file-sharing service, The Pirate Bay, is planning to sue several companies who have in the past accused it of conducting illegal activities.

In a bizarre turn of events, The Pirate Bay are taking legal action after a leaked email originating at a company called MediaDefender (who had allegedly been hired to put a stop to The Pirate Bay's operations) brought some shady activities to light.

"Thanks to the email leakage from MediaDefender, we now have proof of things we've suspected for a long time: the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers and saboteurs to destroy our trackers," The Pirate Bay said in a statement.

Based in Sweden, The Pirate Bay uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to let visitors share videos, games, software and music – mostly without the copyright holder's permission.

Some of the companies allegedly involved in trying to stop The Pirate Bay from letting users share files include the Swedish and Nordic divisions of many major record labels, including Sony BMG, EMI, and Universal.

The emails, leaked on the internet and themselves shared over P2P networks, seem to provide evidence that MediaDefender planned to expose users of The Pirate Bay to malware.

"While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming – all on a commercial level," The Pirate Bay said.

The Pirate Bay tried to buy a man-made island off the Essex coast earlier this year in an attempt to turn it into a "copyright-free paradise".

P2P service eDonkey has also been in the news this week, after seven of its servers in Germany were shut down after legal action.

http://thepiratebay.org
www.mediadefender.com

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