A few hours ago Pirate Bay users were shocked to discover that their favorite torrent site was no longer loading.
Without warning the nameservers were removed from thepiratebay.sx domain, making it impossible to load the site in places where DNS entries were not cached.
TorrentFreak reached out to The Pirate Bay team who informed us that the .SX registry appears to have seized the domain overnight.
The Pirate Bay website itself remains online, however, as the site’s operators quickly relocated to thepiratebay.ac, which uses Ascension Island’s ccTLD.
It’s seems possible that the domain seizure is connected to pressure applied by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which represents a variety of copyright holders.
Last month BREIN sent a letter to the contact email address for The Pirate Bay’s domain, which is registered to site co-founder Fredrik Neij. In their letter BREIN pointed out that the site infringes on the rights of copyright holders worldwide.
The group added that the .SX domain is controlled by the Dutch part of Sint Maarten, suggesting that BREIN has jurisdiction over it.
“We expressly point out that by registering domain names and using these and/or allowing these to be used by The Pirate Bay, you infringe on the rights of Rights Owners. Therefore, the Rights Owners hold you liable for the damages that they have suffered and will suffer from your actions,” the letter read.
Citing previous court orders the anti-piracy group demanded that Neij cease and desist from operating the site and using thepiratebay.sx or any other domain to make the Pirate Bay website available.
The letter set an ultimatum of 22 November and threatened a 25,000 euro per day fine if the site remained online. At the moment it is unclear whether a new court order has been issued and to what extent BREIN is involved in the domain seizure.
TorrentFreak reached out to both the .SX registry and BREIN and we will update this article when we receive responses.
The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, continues to be accessible through the new .AC domain, although only briefly since the ccTLD is UK controlled.
“The AC domain is directly connected to the UK, so it’s just a quick stop there,” a Pirate Bay insider told us. After solving some technical issues the infamous torrent site plans to move to the Peruvian .PE ccTLD.
ThePirateBay.pe will be the fifth domain name for The Pirate Bay in 2013.
Fearing a domain seizure by the Swedish authorities The Pirate Bay quickly switched to a Greenland-based domain in April, later hopping to Iceland, and eventually landing .SX domains as other problems became apparent.
The Pirate Bay hopes for a longer stay at the PE domain, but the site’s operators still have a few dozen domain names backed up if required.
Update: As expected, BREIN now takes credit for the decision of the SX registry to seize Pirate Bay’s domain name.
