After getting sued by a German copyright holder, the company argued that it was doing all it could to screen out copyrighted material.

Simply twiddling a few bits could defeat the hash-based screening, the court ruled, and the six employees were insufficient to proactively examine everything posted to the company's servers before it was made available for download.

Traffic from Italy to the 'bay has actually increased this week and the site has jumped 10 places on Alexa in Italy.

Unfortunately for the people at the IFPI - the driving force behind the block - the results so far aren't what they'd hoped for. Rather like the increases in traffic experienced at HTTPShare when they tried to block that, this week has seen traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay increase too.

The music and movies industries might hate The Pirate Bay with a passion but millions upon millions of regular people love them.

Torrent-tracking site TorrentFreak estimates more than a million users have downloaded the high-definition release of the Olympics opening ceremonies -- perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of the fake fireworks, the lip-synching girl singer or the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.

Over the weekend, NBC aired its video on a 12-hour delay and tried futilely to scrub unauthorized clips from the internet.

In a statement, NBC said: "We're working with the International Olympic Committee and other companies to ensure the take-down of unauthorized content."

An insider working at an Internet provider in Italy told TorrentFreak that all the relevant large access ISPs in Italy have complied with the request to block the popular BitTorrent tracker, which was sent out yesterday.

In a response to the news, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder told TorrentFreak that they have already implemented countermeasures to make sure all Italians will be able to access their site.

"We're quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators," Sunde wrote in a blog entry.

Sunde has his suspicions about the reason for the block, he told us: "It's quite funny that the country Italy is run by the biggest media mogul of them all. we're his competitors."

The company, which also develops the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, had been struggling to make money from their download store, which is one of the causes of the layoffs.

There never was any real competition however, mainly because the movies are infected with Windows DRM.

BitTorrent's Ashwin Navin was a bit more outspoken about it. He said that DRM is "a time bomb waiting to happen," and that it will inspire people to pirate content. One thing we can be sure of, it didn't help to convert illegal downloaders to go legal.

When we reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band's response to it, we hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research we found out that the track wasn't leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

A song doesn't leak by itself and pirates don't have some sort of superhuman ability to get their hands on pre-release material. No, most leaked movies, TV-shows and albums come from the inside so blaming pirates is useless.

The Motion Picture Association of America is suing two websites accused of acting as a for-profit, "one-stop shop" for allegedly infringing copies of Hollywood's copyrighted works.

The sites, fomd.com, known as "Free Online Movie DataBase," and movierumor.com, post, organize, search for, identify, collect and index links to infringing material that is available on third-party websites.

With a smile on his face Rock says, "I'm rich," so sure it's OK to steal my music. Oh, and while you're at it, "Steal everything." Steal an iPod, Steve Jobs is a billionaire, he'll never miss it. Get yourself a Toyota, "They're foreign" and the gas too, "You know how much money the oil companies make?" Rock shrugs it all off, "They're not going to miss $30 or $40 worth of gas."

With the US and other G8 countries trying to outlaw The Pirate Bay and its ilk, an anonymous reader suggests that a solution may have emerged out of Cornell University. A new open-source project called Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has hit yet another website over copyright infringement with a new lawsuit. The organization says that Pullmylink.com facilitates copyright infringement by indexing and posting links to what the MPAA believes is pirated content.

The MPAA sued BitTorrent, eDonkey, USENET, and TorrentSpy (among others) for making it easy to find and download copyrighted content, too.

Of course, the MPAA's lawsuit against Pullmylink.com has another effect that the MPAA is fully aware of. People who had no idea Pullmylink.com existed (including me) are now aware of it and what it offers.