Pirate Bay Back, But Not For Long

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June 05, 2006 (7:11 PM EDT)

By K.C. Jones , TechWeb Technology News

The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracking site made good on its promise to return after authorities seized its entire server farm, but it was down again late Monday.

Authorities shut down the the Swedish sitelast week. It was up again Saturday but, by Monday, it contained a vague message about why it was not operating. The shut down was the latest in a tug-of-war between Pirate Bay and authorities and a larger battle between tech-savvy entertainment fans and hackers and entertainment companies.

The BitTorrent tracking site raised the ire of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which referred to it as one of the world's largest most well known facilitators of online piracy. The site directs people to more than 157,000 movies, according to the MPAA, which filed a criminal complaint in 2004.

Several news reports have suggested that the raid on The Pirate Bay motivated hackers to cause Swedish government Web sites to crash over the past several days. Sony and Warner Music were also hacked, according to the Inquirer, which provides links to images showing the result.

Supporters of the file-sharing site organized a protest Saturday against Sweden's prohibition on downloading copyrighted material.

By Monday, the site had only a message stating, "We're experiencing some issues with the database. Please try again soon."