Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay is demanding
compensation from the IFPI for a court decision that found the site blocked
from customers of the Denmark’s Tele2 ISP.
The block, initiated last February by the IFPI, ordered
Tele2 to shut off access to The Pirate Bay after a Danish court found the ISP
to be unlawfully assisting in the distribution of copyrighted works, by allowing
customers to access The Pirate Bay’s BitTorrent tracker and search engine.
Critics feared the ruling would soon spread to a number of other countries, and
IFPI executives in nearby Norway and Finland announced they were looking into
similar court action.
Writing in his blog,
Pirate Bay co-founder Peter “Brokep” Sunde said the site will file a legal complaint,
asking to be compensated for the time the site spent blocked in Denmark, with
proceeds to be spent funding Danish artists interested in sharing their music
online, for free. Sunde said the money would be handled by the Danish
Piratgruppen, and that unlike the IFPI, The Pirate Bay will only ask for “a
reasonable amount of money.”
“The grant will give out money to Danish aspiring artists
for making music and releasing it for free,” said Sunde, “And all will be
sponsored by IFPI since they tried to fuck those people over. Poetic justice.”
The Pirate Bay’s demand for compensation represents its
second maneuver in the case of IFPI v. Tele2: shortly after the block was
implemented administrators opened The Jesper Bay, a site for Danish users that
provided instructions for circumventing Tele2’s restrictions.
Sunde notes that while the site has risen from 29th
to 24th in Alexa rankings, “we’ve had to do a lot to defend
ourselves and that we need compensation for the users that lost access to the
site and for the people who are spreading their works using The Pirate Bay.”
Earlier this month the IFPI demanded
$2.5m from The Pirate Bay, for its role in illegally facilitating the distribution
of a handful of music CDs, movies, and video games.