One might think it a stretch to take a label given to Mussolini by history and place it atop Silvio Berlusconi’s head, but that’s precisely what The Pirate Bay have done. Why for? The Italian government’s organizing of a clean sweep of Italian ISPs to prevent access to the BitTorrent website.

Indeed, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is annoyed, according to TorrentFreak, and is claiming discrimination by fascism. The block put in place by ISPs is said to have been implemented with a formal government request issued Friday. TPB presented a brief explanation on its blog concerning the matter, and is for the moment asking Italian users to redirect their browser to another .org address, dubbed “La Baia.”

Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister between 1994-5, 2001-6, and now 2008 once more, has a particularly strong desire to do away with copyright infringement on the Web. He is the founder and majority owner of Fininvest, a media and finance conglomerate that controls much of the nation’s television market within the Mediaset empire, as well as the film company Medusa.

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