Record labels from Finland, a Nordic land full of guitars strung with grim repose and death metal, have filed a lawsuit at the District Court of Helsinki to block access to The Pirate Bay.

SiliconANGLE has covered actions against The Pirate Bay before, a now infamous BitTorrent tracker (dubbed the world’s largest) that is constantly tangled up in controversial questions of facilitating the copyright infringement of millions of digital content properties such as Hollywood movies and major music albums.

Details on the ground of this petition are scant, but AFP is running a short article on the subject,

“The development of a legal online market is impossible in Finland if illegal services like The Pirate Bay are freely allowed to continue their operations,” said Lauri Rechardt, a spokesman for Finland’s branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the companies.

Finland’s Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre filed the petition on behalf of the IFPI, asking the courts to require Internet provider Elisa to block access to The Pirate Bay from Finland.

The Pirate Bay has suffered raids by Swedish police at the behest of record labels, constant legal harassment, and a growing tide of resentment by the music and movie industry—in fact, yesterday, May 21^st 2011 was exactly 5 years since a devastating police raid failed to silence the eerily durable service. They are veterans of constant bombardment. The last time, a district court in Sweden made the bad decision to force an ISP to disconnect them.

That decision didn’t affect them long—just like this petition wouldn’t even if it comes to fruition.

Instead of punishing TPB, IFPI will be taking responsibility out of the hands of Finnish citizens to make their own decisions on the Internet. Savvy users will still be able to proxy through other countries to reach TPB—something that ISP Elisa will have extreme difficulty blocking or even detecting.

When it comes right down to it, The Pirate Bay doesn’t deliver any copyrighted content (or any digital content whatsoever, for that matter) into the hands of visitors. BitTorrent trackers merely point the way to where torrents can be had. In this fashion, Google is an equally powerful tracker and IFPI should perhaps start arguing that Finnish residents aren’t mature enough to use the world’s largest search engine responsibly either.

Most civilized states are content to let The Pirate Bay run and deliver their tracking content. In fact, most Internet Service Providers, who bear the brunt of the traffic generated by their enterprise, will actively aid them when something causes their website to become inaccessible to potential visitors. As seen recently when numerous Comcast users suddenly became unable to reach their website and the cable network themselves aided in determining that it was another ISP where the fault happened.

While the legal tide seems to be turning against BitTorrent trackers like The Pirate Bay, still many courts in the Nordic countries refuse to allow draconian measures that punish citizens in order to get at TPB. For example, last year a Dutch court ruled that there was no evidence that enough traffic using TPB through two major ISPs had anything to do with copyright infringement. Reflecting numerous voices pointing out that any court requiring an entire country or ISP to block the service would unduly burden innocent and mature citizens from accessing the world how they choose to.

In spite of claims that BitTorrent trackers and other controversial services that could facilitate copyright infringement (and technologies from cassette tapes, to VCRs, to DVDRs) would impact “legal online markets” fall flat when the fact is that legal online markets for music and movies are insanely lucrative. Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, this list is almost limitless in the number of ventures that seem to totally ignore the would-be crushing power of The Pirate Bay and other trackers constantly targeted by the media industries.