Way back in 2013, anti-piracy prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad filed a motion targeting two key Pirate Bay domain names – ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se.
Ingblad filed a complaint against Punkt SE (IIS), the organization responsible for Sweden’s top level .SE domain, arguing that the domains are tools that The Pirate Bay uses to infringe copyright.
In April 2015 the case was heard and a month later the Stockholm District Court ruled that The Pirate Bay should forfeit both ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se to the state. The case later went to appeal.
In May 2016, the Svea Court of Appeal handed down its decision which upheld the decision of the Stockholm District Court, finding that since they assisted with crimes, the domains could be seized.
With that established a question remained – should the domains be seized from Pirate Bay co-founder and domain owner Fredrik Neij or from IIS, the organization responsible for Sweden’s top-level .SE domain?
The Court subsequently found that domain names should be considered a type of intellectual property, property owned by the purchaser of the domain. In this case, therefore, IIS was not considered the owner of the Pirate Bay domains, Fredrik Neij was.
Neij subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the District Court and the Court of Appeal wrongly concluded that a domain name is a type of property that can be confiscated.
Today the Supreme Court handed down its decision, siding with the lower courts and determining that the domains – ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se – can indeed be seized by the state.
“The Supreme Court declares that the right to domain names constitutes property that may be forfeited as the Court of Appeal previously found,” its judgment reads.
Since the decision was handed down, things have been moving quickly. Kjetil Jensen of Online Group, the parent company of domain registry Binero, informs TorrentFreak that the police have already moved to take over the domains in question.
“Today Binero, Binero.se, (registrar for thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se) received an executive request from Swedish Police to take over ownership of the domain names thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se because the Swedish Supreme Court now allows the domain names to be seized,” Jensen says.
“The WHOIS of the domain names shows that the domain names no longer have any active name servers and the next step in this process is that the Police will take over the ownership of the domain names.”
While Binero will cooperate with the authorities, the company doesn’t believe that seizure will solve the online copyright infringement problem.
“Binero considers that the confiscation of a domain name is an ineffective approach to prevent criminal activity on the internet,” Jensen says.
“Moving a site to another top-level domain is very easy. And even if you want to close the domain, content is still available over the internet, using both the IP address and search engines etc.”
Indeed, The Pirate Bay saw this day coming a long way off and has already completely migrated to its original domain, ThePirateBay.org.
Despite the ruling, the site remains fully accessible, but it appears a line has been drawn in the sand in Sweden when it comes to domains that are used to break the law. They will be easier to seize in future, thanks to this lengthy legal process.
The judgment is available here (PDF, Swedish)
