The hosting company shut down The Pirate Bay.

German hosting company CyberBunker has complied with a court ruling and shut down the world's largest torrent tracker, The Pirate Bay.

Last week, the Hamburg District Court banned hosting company Cyberbunker from providing hosting services to the torrent tracker The Pirate Bay. This decision followed a lawsuit filed by a copyright holder company within the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

If the hoster had failed to comply with the court's order, it would have had to pay a fine of 250,000 euros for each instance of copyright infringement using The Pirate Bay torrent tracker.

Cyberbunker representatives emphasized that The Pirate Bay's existence does not violate any laws; the project is merely a search engine for the BitTorrent protocol and searches for websites located on users' computers.

The Pirate Bay is currently searching for a new hosting provider. The company's servers were successfully maintained and were not affected by the termination.

As a reminder, several Russian file hosting services and torrent trackers suffered from copyright claims this spring. However, in these cases, law enforcement agencies didn't wait for a court decision, but simply shut down the servers or terminated domain delegations.