Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) explained the decision should indicate an inevitable end to LimeWire and its services. “Unlike other P2P (peer-to-peer) services that negotiated licenses, imposed filters or otherwise chose to discontinue their illegal conduct following the Supreme Court's decision in the Grokster case, LimeWire instead thumbed its nose at the law and creators.”
He continued, "The court's decision is an important milestone in the creative community's fight to reclaim the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce. The court has sent a clear signal to those who think they can devise and profit from a piracy scheme that will escape accountability."
Though the court has not ruled on monetary damages yet, the RIAA is seeking $150,000 for every piece of infringing work made available by LimeWire. A conference for further proceedings is set for June 1.

The Pirate Bay Goes Down Following Legal Pressure
Written by Ernesto on May 17, 2010

The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.

the pirate bayA few days ago we exclusively revealed that several major Hollywood movie studios had obtained a preliminary injunction against CyberBunker operator CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG from the Regional Court of Hamburg.

The injunction, which was granted without an oral hearing, stated that CB3ROB and Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis were now prohibited from connecting The Pirate Bay website and its servers to the Internet.

yesterday Kamphuis officially confirmed receiving the injunction and has decided to stop routing The Pirate Bay’s traffic until his lawyers have carefully read and reviewed the legal documents. This decision has resulted in downtime for the world’s largest BitTorrent site.

A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they are not planning to wait for a decision from the Cyberbunker team, and that they’ve already set the backup process in motion which will bring the site back online. The Pirate Bay’s servers are untouched and getting the site up and running only requires the routing (IP-tunnel) to go through another provider.

It may take several hours before this process has been completed and before all ISPs see the new AS-path. TorrentFreak was assured, however, that things will return to normal as soon as possible, probably within hours.

Ever since The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided back in 2006, the operators of the site have taken extreme measures to ensure that there are proper backup mechanisms in place and that the locations of the servers are well concealed. Where the servers are actually located remains a mystery.

Update: The site is still offline after a few hours. The Pirate Bay teams is working hard on getting it back up but there’s no ETA.

Update: The site is back for most people now.

Via TorrentFreak.com