Last November, private BitTorrent tracker Torrent.is was served with a preliminary injunction, which eventually led to the site shutting down and a 50 percent decrease in its overall Internet traffic in Iceland.

At the public hearing of the case that was held earlier this week, the plaintiffs requested for monetary damages and the permanent shutdown of the site.

Snæbjörn Steingrímsson, an executive at SMAIS (the association of film rights-holder in Iceland), led the investigation and said the torrent site cost his clients "a few hundred million ISK." Torrent.is had 26,500 active users at its peak and claimed as much as 10 percent of Iceland's population.

"The plaintiffs are making an outrageous claim," says Svavar Kjarrval, the head administrator of Torrent.is. "They argue that website and domain owners should always be responsible for copyright violations of third parties. The case could set a dangerous precedent if the court agrees with their claims."

The past few months have seen a handful of copyright infringement cases involving Torrents sites and the Internet service providers that service them, for the illegal online distribution of movie, music and software files. 

Last November, torrent tracker Demonoid went offline, indefinitely, after the Canadian Recording Industry Association threatened to take legal action against its operators. More recently, Danish ISP Tele2 was slapped with a court injunction in February, ordering it to block access to torrent site The Pirate Bay after it concluded that the ISP was assisting in copyright infringement.