Pirate Bay owners devise scheme to bankrupt law firm
In a move that is either devilishly clever or absolutely boneheaded, the owners of Pirate Bay have devised a plan to pay their court-ordered fine – and to force their accusers out of business. It's an attack of 10m tiny hits, which calls on the same legions of "pirates" who made Pirate Bay into the world's most notorious filesharing hub.
Less than a month ago, four Swedish men were given prison sentences for their roles in Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker that centralises free music, film and software trading. Ordered to pay 30m SEK (£2.5m), site founder Gottfrid Svartholm has instead launched a campaign dubbed "internet-avgift", or "internet fee", a play on Sweden's television licence fee, the tv-avgift.
Internet-avgift's advocates describe it as a DDO$ attack, a reference to DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, a standard component of the internet hacker toolbox. While a conventional DDOS attack encourages a flood of e-traffic to knock a website offline, the so-called DDO$ encourages a shower of, er, money, to overload the victim.
Using a website modelled on the one for Sweden's television licensing body, Svartholm and his colleagues have called on Pirate Bay supporters to send money to Danowsky & Partners, the law firm that represented the music industry at their trial. By sending no more than one Swedish kronar (£0.08) at a time, the Danowsky firm will be forced to spend thousands of pounds processing little more than pocket change.
The internet-avgift website claims that the lawyers' bank charges a fee for all payments after the first 1000 and that the small Stockholm firm is ill-equipped for a torrent of payments.
Of course, while Pirate Bay's last-gasp prank could end up ruining Danwosky & Partners, tossing the firm's lawyers into a pit of bankruptcy and despair, it also ... might not. Certainly most court rulings hold the losers, not the winners, responsible for any excessive payment processing fees. And although Pirate Bay's captains may be some of the world's sneakiest filesharers, they are not, well ... lawyers. And when it comes to the law, lawyers have an uncanny ability to end up on top.
:source: Source: Guardian.co.uk
