IFPI website hacked to protest Pirate Bay trial

The Swedish website for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry was defaced Thursday by hackers protesting the group's involvement in the ongoing Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm.


The message on the homepage of the recording industry association's website urged Pirate Bay prosecutor Haakan Roswall of Stockholm to "stop lying." The hackers, calling themselves "The New Generation," said the intrusion was a "declaration of war against the anti-piracy industry."

The site was restored by early Thursday.

"It is deplorable that these saboteurs will go to such extremes as to infringe on our and others' freedom of speech on the internet," said Lars Gustafsson, a director of the IFPI in Sweden, which is trying to shutter Pirate Bay, the notorious BitTorrent tracker with more than 22 million users.

Peter Sunde, who is one of the four on trial, condemned the attack.

"Whomever is hacking the IFPI websites, please stop doing that," he wrote on Twitter. "It only makes us look bad!"

It's not the first time the IFPI has been swashbuckled. In 2007, the Pirate Bay briefly acquired control of the IFPI's international website site via a cybersquatter.

Is this the death of BitTorrent?

The people who run the massive BitTorrent site Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.org) are going on trial for copyright violations next week in Stockholm, Sweden.

BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol which is widely used to share large media files like television shows, movies and music.

TorrentFreak has an interesting article which quotes Raynor Vliegendhart of the Tribler P2P team at Delft University of Technology, who believes that the Pirate Bay’s servers support as much as 50 percent of all the BitTorrent traffic on the Internet.

So the general belief is if they go down for any extended time — or, God forbid, permanently — it could have a huge impact on torrent users everywhere, including leading to the failure of other trackers (sites that coordinate the sharing process) due to overload.

What are your thoughts on the topic? Is this truly the end?