A court ruling that forced a Finnish ISP to block The Pirate Bay has angered the hacktivist group
By Jeremy Kirk
January 10, 2012 09:00 AM ET
IDG News Service -
Anonymous has struck the websites of two anti-piracy organizations, a
day after Finnish ISP Elisa blocked access to The Pirate Bay search
engine in response to an injunction requested by one of the
organizations.
The Finnish site for the International Federation
of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the website for the Copyright
Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) of Finland were both offline,
apparently as a result of a distributed denial-of-service attack, said
Antti Kotilainen , CIAPC's managing director. CIAPC does work for the
IFPI, he said.
"It doesn't really affect our work but of course it's annoying," Kotilainen said.
The owner of the Twitter account "
@anon_finland" took credit for the attack, writing on Monday that "we'll keep it down as long as want."
On
Monday Elisa stopped its subscribers accessing The Pirate Bay and other
associated websites and domain-name servers, to comply with a temporary
injunction issued by a Helsinki court at the request of IFPI Finland in
October. Elisa has filed an appeal with Helsinki's Court of Appeal,
according to a company statement.
The
IFPI is asking for injunctions that would force two other major ISPs,
TeliaSonera and DNA, to block The Pirate Bay, Kotilainen said. Those
rulings may be released as soon as next month, Kotilainen said.
If
granted, the injunctions would mean the website would be blocked in
about 80 percent of the Finnish broadband market, Kotilainen said.
The
Pirate Bay enables users to search for torrents, or small information
files that coordinate the download of content among people using the
BitTorrent file-sharing system. For years, it has drawn the ire of the
entertainment industry, who allege that most of the content it indexes
has been shared in violation of copyright protections.
In
November, IFPI Finland and music companies Warner Bros., EMI, Universal
Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a civil suit in Finland
against three men affiliated with The Pirate Bay: Peter Sunde, Fredrik
Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. The suit asks the court for
compensation and for the three to stop infringing copyright, Kotilainen
said.
Kotilainen said he holds little hope for compensation.
In
April 2009, the three men plus Carl Lundstrm, were each sentenced to
one year in prison in a Stockholm court for being accessories to crimes
against copyright law. The court ordered that the four pay about 11
million Swedish kronor to Twentieth Century Fox and $54,000 to Sony
Music Entertainment in Sweden. They were also supposed to forfeit 1.2
million Swedish kronor (US$140,000) in advertising revenue generated
from the site.
In 2010, three of the four men lost an appeal, but they hope Sweden's Supreme Court will take on the case, according to the
TorrentFreak blog.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com