Domains have become an integral part of the piracy wars and no one knows this better than The Pirate Bay.
The site has burned through numerous domains over the years, with copyright holders and authorities successfully pressurizing registries to destabilize the site.
The latest news on this front comes from the Central American country of Costa Rica, where the local domain registry is having problems with the United States government.
The drama is detailed in a letter to ICANN penned by Dr. Pedro León Azofeifa, President of the Costa Rican Academy of Science, which operates NIC Costa Rica, the registry in charge of local .CR domain names.
Azofeifa’s letter is addressed to ICANN board member Thomas Schneider and pulls no punches. It claims that for the past two years the United States Embassy in Costa Rica has been pressuring NIC Costa Rica to take action against a particular domain.
“Since 2015, the United Estates Embassy in Costa Rica, who represents the interests of the United States Department of Commerce, has frequently contacted our organization regarding the domain name thepiratebay.cr,” the letter to ICANN reads.
“These interactions with the United States Embassy have escalated with time and include great pressure since 2016 that is exemplified by several phone calls, emails, and meetings urging our ccTLD to take down the domain, even though this would go against our domain name policies.”
The letter states that following pressure from the US, the Costa Rican Ministry of Commerce carried out an investigation which concluded that not taking down the domain was in line with best practices that only require suspensions following a local court order. That didn’t satisfy the United States though, far from it.
“The representative of the United States Embassy, Mr. Kevin Ludeke, Economic Specialist, who claims to represent the interests of the US Department of
Commerce, has mentioned threats to close our registry, with repeated harassment
regarding our practices and operation policies,” the letter to ICANN reads.
Ludeke is indeed listed on the US Embassy site for Costa Rica. He’s also referenced in a 2008 diplomatic cable leaked previously by Wikileaks. Contacted via email, Ludeke did not immediately respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment.
Surprisingly, Azofeifa says the US representative then got personal, making negative comments towards his Executive Director, “based on no clear evidence or statistical data to support his claims, as a way to pressure our organization to take down the domain name without following our current policies.”
Citing the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society of 2005, Azofeifa asserts that “policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of the States,” which in Costa Rica’s case means that there must be “a final judgment from the Courts of Justice of the Republic of Costa Rica” before the registry will suspend a domain.
But it seems legal action was not the preferred route of the US Embassy. Demanding that NIC Costa Rica take unilateral action, Mr. Ludeke continued with “pressure and harassment to take down the domain name without its proper process and local court order.”
Azofeifa’s letter to ICANN, which is cc’d to Stafford Fitzgerald Haney, United States Ambassador to Costa Rica and various people in the Costa Rican Ministry of Commerce, concludes with a request for suggestions on how to deal with the matter.
While the response should prove very interesting, none of the parties involved appear to have noticed that ThePirateBay.cr isn’t officially connected to The Pirate Bay
The domain and associated site appeared in the wake of the December 2014 shut down of The Pirate Bay, claiming to be the real deal and even going as far as making fake accounts in the names of famous ‘pirate’ groups including ettv and YIFY.
Today it acts as an unofficial and unaffiliated reverse proxy to The Pirate Bay while presenting the site’s content as its own. It’s also affiliated with a fake KickassTorrents site, Kickass.cd, which to this day claims that it’s a reincarnation of the defunct torrent giant.
But perhaps the most glaring issue in this worrying case is the apparent willingness of the United States to call out Costa Rica for not doing anything about a .CR domain run by third parties, when the real Pirate Bay’s .org domain is under United States’ jurisdiction.
Registered by the Public Interest Registry in Reston, Virginia, ThePirateBay.org is the famous site’s main domain. TorrentFreak asked PIR if anyone from the US government had ever requested action against the domain but at the time of publication, we had received no response.
