Pirate Bay owners Gottfrid Svartholm (aka anakata), Peter Sunde (aka brokep), Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), and Carl Lundstrom recently were given prison sentences for their roles in running a BitTorrent torrent aggregator that centralises free music, film and software trading. Ordered to pay 30 million Swedish kronor (SEK), Anakata has instead launched a campaign dubbed "internet-avgift", or "internet fee", a play on Sweden's television licence fee, the tv-avgift. Using a website modelled on the one run by Sweden's television licensing body, Pirate Bay founders are encouraging their fans to assist them in sending money to Danowsky & Partners, the law firm that represented the music industry at their trial. The internet-avgift in fact consists of a "DDO$" attack, a reference to DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. While a standard DDOS attack encourages a flood of e-traffic to knock a website offline, the so-called DDO$ encourages a shower of payments to overload the victim. Receiving no more than one Swedish kronor at a time, the Danowsky firm will be forced to spend a huge amount of money processing little more than pocket change, as the bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Pirate Bay's captains are some of the world's sneakiest filesharers and their last mischievous act could end up ruining the law firm. Will the ill-equipped lawyers succumb to a torrent of payments? Or will they end up on top? The trial continues.
Valentina Culatti