It looks like after the people involved with the Pirate Bay web site were convicted of copyright infringement earlier this year, the IFPI is starting to threaten other torrent sharing sites by threatening their web hosts.

To give you a little more information about the key players here, the Pirate Bay, a torrent sharing web site, provides what you could call the “path” to be able to download copyrighted materials.  The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) is the music industry’s lobby group who is doing some of their heavy handed grunt work when it comes to shutting down web sites like the Pirate Bay.

The new tactic here is that the IFPI are skipping over the web site owners and are now going directly to the web hosts who host the torrent web sites in question.  They want to get the web hosts on a charge of assisting copyright infringement, which is a decision that has yet to be appealed.

There is one web host who has yet to given into the demands of the IFPI.  The Swedish provider Portlane has filed a complaint in the Swedish Market Court.  Now true, sharing copyrighted materials might be wrong, I will leave that judgment call up to you.

What is to be admired here is a small guy standing up against the establishment, showing the IFPI and the world that we should be a society who serves the people’s best interest and not the best interest of the one with the biggest wallet.