Pirate Bay saved by political ally

Sweden's Pirate Party is now providing bandwidth for the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay after its previous internet service provider Cyber Bunker pulled the plug due to a court injunction obtained by US movie studios.

The Pirate Party's leader, Rick Falk Vinge said that "providing bandwidth to a search engine and homepage is completely legal."

Describing contact with The Pirate Bay as routine, Falk Vinge explained that on Tuesday morning the two organisations agreed that the party would provide bandwidth.

The controversial Bittorrent filesharing website had been down for about 20 hours.

Twenty hours earlier Cyber Bunker, which has its servers in a former nuclear bunker in the Netherlands, removed Internet access after receiving the German court injunction.

The plaintiffs were Disney Enterprises, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox and Universal City Studios.

Cyber Bunker intends to oppose the court injunction and file counter-claims.

In a long defiant statement in Swedish on the political party's website, Falk Vinge says, "Pirate Bay is a search page and as such it is not responsible for the results.

"We got tired of Hollywood's cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay. It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity.

"The proposals to censor out the Pirate Bay from the Internet is... nothing less than political censorship, and something that any democratic-minded person must reject.

"We are now The Pirate Bay's ISP."

The original founders of The Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year in jail and fined over the issue of downloading copyrighted material, but that ruling is under appeal.

The website's recent vanishing act is not the first time it's changed ISPs. The website had previously been denied Internet service for a few hours in 2009.

The Pirate Party explains that although it is providing the bandwidth to the home page and search engine, the Bittorrent tracker and torrent files that previously existed on The Pirate Bay website are now located elsewhere.

The Pirate Bay's tracker and files were never affected by the ISP's action, says the party.