Pirate Bay on the run as hosts jump ship

File sharing site The Pirate Bay was out of commission on Tuesday as it struggled to find hosting providers willing to serve the site.

• Google admits mistake in blocking Pirate Bay (4 Oct 09)
• Downloads rocket as Swedes go legal (2 Oct 09)
• Many Swedes still download illegally: poll (30 Sep 09)

Last Wednesday, Swedish bandwidth supplier PatrikWeb quit servicing The Pirate Bay, and since then the site has been forced to use different providers throughout Europe, the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper reports.

At first a supplier in the Ukraine ensured that the site could continue functioning late last week.

But the solution was short lived after BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy organization, discovered Pirate Bay's traffic was being routed through the Netherlands and pressured a Dutch supplier to cut off service, according to the tech news website Torrentfreak.com.

Since then, The Pirate Bay has bounced around to several providers, most recently landing with CB3Rob.net, a German host with ties to the country’s own chapter of the Pirate Party.

“They contacted us and said that they needed our services,” CB3Rob.net’s Sven Kamphuis told SvD of the company's decision to throw The Pirate Bay a lifeline.

But on Tuesday morning, the file sharing site wasn’t working, something which Kamphuis attributed to technical problems.

According to SvD, the Pirate Bay’s problems securing a steady host are due in part to fears that operators may face legal action from an entertainment industry committed to curbing illegal file sharing.

Monique Wadsted, a lawyer representing the interests of American film companies in Sweden, confirmed she’d been pressuring Swedish firms to stop supplying The Pirate Bay with bandwidth.

“I usually call and talk to them. It’s nice to get off on the right foot; there’s no reason to pull out the big guns right away,” she told the newspaper.

She explained that she nevertheless sent letters to PatrikWeb warning that the company risked being sued if it didn’t cut off service to The Pirate Bay.

Peter Sunde, one of the site’s founders and former spokesperson no longer has a formal role with The Pirate Bay.

Nevertheless, he expressed his amusement over the entertainment industry’s tireless quest to sink The Pirate Bay.

“It’s terribly entertaining to see all the work the law firms are putting into threatening those who supply the internet’s infrastructure, and even if they get their way, as legally offensive as it is, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Sunde wrote in an email to SvD.

Also on Tuesday, a Swedish court dismissed bias allegations lodged against two of the judges set to preside over the appeals phase of The Pirate Bay trial.

Last week, defence lawyer Per E. Samuelsson asked the court to rule on whether appeals court chief judge Kristina Boutz and appeals court judge Ulrika Ihrfelt were unfit to rule on the case due to conflicts of interest.

Boutz is a member of the copyright organization SFIR and Ihrfelt has been a member of the copyright group SFU.

But the Svea Court of Appeal ruled that the pair’s membership in the organizations did not constitute bias.

Appeals court proceedings for the four men convicted in The Pirate Bay trial are scheduled to start on November 13th.