After expensive court action earlier this year, a group of music labels achieved their aim of having The Pirate Bay website blocked by ISPs in the UK.
With the official site inaccessible via direct means, many Pirate Bay users switched over to proxy services. With millions of visitors a month, the proxy of the UK Pirate Party soon became one of the most-visited websites in the region.
Music industry group BPI objected to this alternative route to The Pirate Bay and asked the Pirate Party to take down their proxy service. When it became clear the Pirates had no intention of doing so, the BPI decided to send its lawyers after six individual party members last week.
This transformed the nature of the dispute and the stakes involved. The party members in question were not just fighting for their ideals anymore but also their personal belongings, facing potential personal bankruptcy through a grinding and expensive legal battle.
While it initially appeared that the Pirate Party was determined to keep their proxy online and fight the issue in court, they unexpectedly pulled the service offline Monday evening. Initially the site wasn’t loading at all but it currently redirects to a page announcing that more information will be released later.
TorrentFreak has been in touch with several key people in the party since Monday evening, but all said they were instructed not to talk by their solicitors. Initially we were told that a statement would be made public on Tuesday, but the party remained silent.
Considering the legal pressure applied by the music industry last week, it’s safe to assume that the sudden shutdown is related to the looming legal dispute. At this point it seems doubtful that the Pirate Party will fight the issue in court as the legal fundraiser campaign has also been taken offline.
We suspect that the solicitors of both the BPI and the Pirate Party are currently discussing options for resolving the dispute in a peaceful manner.
The recent run-in with the music industry over the Pirate Bay proxy might not be the first. Several weeks ago TorrentFreak noticed that the UK Pirate Party changed its robots.txt file to contain instructions to Google not to index the site. The Pirate Party did not respond to our inquiries on this issue, but it’s not unlikely that the changes were made because rightsholders were overloading the party with takedown requests.
When more information comes in from the UK Pirate Party we will update this article accordingly. The BPI was also asked for a comment on the recent developments but we have yet to hear back from them.
Meanwhile, former users of the Pirate Party’s proxy are moving on to one of the many alternatives that remain online.
Update: BPI confirmed that the Pirate Party proxy will remain offline. More information here.
