It has been a busy month for The Pirate Bay’s IT department thus far, with the site skipping from domain to domain.
Two weeks ago the notorious BitTorrent site traded in its .SE domain for the Greenland-based .GL TLD. The Pirate Bay took this decision because they feared that Swedish authorities were about to take over their domain names.
However, TPB did not receive a warm welcome in Greenland.
Within two days of the move The Pirate Bay lost both its .GL domain names. Tele-Post, the private company responsible for .GL registrations, did not wait for a court order and said it would not allow the domains to be put to “illegal” use.
Resilient as always, TPB aren’t about to give up that easily and have already lined up yet another domain name. This time they’re going for Iceland’s .IS TLD, which will be a little harder to take offline.
Ahoy Iceland
Thepiratebay.is was registered after the Greenland debacle and traffic was redirected to the new domain a few minutes ago. Iceland is an interesting choice as the country previously positioned itself as a safe haven for freedom of speech.
Whether The Pirate Bay’s activities are considered protected under this definition remains to be seen, but ISNIC, the company responsible for .IS domains, informs TorrentFreak that they have no plans to treat thepiratebay.is any differently to their other domains.
When we asked whether ISNIC would follow Greenland’s lead and move for a proactive suspension, we got a clear answer.
“The short answer is no. Such an action would require a formal order from an Icelandic court. ISNIC is not responsible for a registrant’s usage of their domains,” ISNIC’s Marius Olafsson told TorrentFreak.
This is not the first time that Iceland’s registry has been asked about possible actions against a controversial domain. In 2010, when Wikileaks was hosted under an .IS TLD, the company gave the same response.
“This policy applies equally to any .is domain,” Olafsson says, adding that it’s the domain owner’s responsibility to abide by the law, not theirs.
“There is an article in our registration rules which states that ‘the registrant is responsible for ensuring that the use of the domain is within the limits of Icelandic law as current at any time’,” he explains.
ISNIC’s position means that The Pirate Bay will probably be operating from the .IS domain for a while. Technically copyright holders could file a complaint, but without a prior ruling against the site in Iceland this will probably turn out to be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor.
Even if the domain was taken away, The Pirate Bay would probably move on to the next one as if nothing happened. Until they run out of domains.
Update: Several users report that the domain change has made TPB accessible again om ISPs where it was previously blocked. We assume that the respective blocklists will all be updated in the near future.
