A judge in the northern town of Bergamo, Italy, has ordered Italian ISPs to block access to the Swedish file-sharing Web site The Pirate Bay in a crackdown on the illegal sharing of copyright material over the Internet.

Four individuals identified as the administrators of the Swedish site, a BitTorrent tracker that reportedly receives more than 20 million visitors a month, are currently under investigation for infringing Italian copyright law, Colonel Alessandro Nencini of the Bergamo finance police said in an interview Thursday.

Nencini said Bergamo deputy public prosecutor Giancarlo Mancusi had requested the shutdown after receiving a complaint from the Federation against Musical Piracy (FPM) in Milan.

Pirate Bay responded by inviting Italian users to switch to OpenDNS to bypass their ISPs' filters or use the alternative URL http://labaia.org -- "the bay" in Italian. But Italian authorities said they were confident access to the site had been completely cut off by Thursday.

Pirate Bay's administrators described the action as an assault on freedom of speech that was intended to protect the commercial interests of Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate who is prime minister of Italy.

"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," Pirate Bay said on its blog. It invited Italian Internet users to contact their ISPs to urge them to appeal against the judge's ruling.

Pirate Bay has two weeks to lodge an appeal against the judge's action, Nencini said. "They have threatened to appeal against the order, but so far no one has made contact with us on their behalf," he said.

This is the first time a judge in Italy has ordered an Internet blockade in response to complaints about copyright violations, said Luca Vespignani, the director general of FPM. "Today it is completely impossible to connect to Pirate Bay from Italy," Vespignani said in an interview.

Access to alternative Web addresses and even future addresses connected to Pirate Bay have been blocked under the judge's order, Vespignani said. "If every country were to do this, it would put a stop to these illegal activities. I hope this model will be followed by other European countries," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.