Today The Pirate Bay returns to its Swedish based .SE domain, after a domain hopping exercise of little more than a week.
The trouble started last week when the notorious BitTorrent site lost its .SX domain after pressure from the anti-piracy outfit BREIN. In a response The Pirate Bay moved to Ascension Island’s .AC ccTLD, and later Peru’s .PE domain, but both these domains were suspended as well.
Yesterday The Pirate Bay switched over to Guyana’s .GY ccTLD, where the torrent site wasn’t welcome either. Within a day of thepiratebay.gy becoming operational the local registry has already taken it offline.
TorrentFreak reached out to the GY registry which didn’t name a specific reason for the suspension, other than the following.
“Once a site violates our policies, it will be suspended,” the registry noted in a statement. A brief inspection of the registry’s acceptable use policy reveals that linking to copyrighted material is sufficient to warrant a suspension.
After the .GY domain was lost a few hours ago The Pirate Bay moved back to its old home, thepiratebay.se. The site is expected to remain in Sweden’s relatively calm waters for the time being.
The Pirate Bay
The return to the .SE domain is noteworthy, as this domain is also at risk of being seized.
On behalf of several major movie, music and publishing companies, Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad filed a motion at a Stockholm court in April, requesting the seizure of thepiratebay.se, piratebay.se and the new thepiratebay.is domains.
“There is widespread copyright infringement linked to these sites and these domains are used to assist in connection with crime,” Ingblad wrote in the complaint.
Ironically, this looming seizure was the main reason why TPB traded in its .SE domain for a Greenland-based domain in April, before switching to a .IS and a .SX domain when other problems became apparent.
The good news for The Pirate Bay, however, is that the .SE domain registry previously stated that it will not suspend the domain name unless there is a court order. This means that Sweden should be a safe haven for now.
