The Pirate Bay Is Back After Nearly Two Months Of Downtime
Source: Darrell Etherington
One of the Internet’s most targeted, and yet also most hard-to-kill sites is back again following a raid on its servers over seven weeks ago: The Pirate Bay resides once again at its familiar “.se” URL, offering a database that appears to be fairly intact, with torrents mostly in place up to its closure on December 9. The website, a famed destination for those seeking pirated material (but which also seeks simply to provide a portal for sharing of information via bit torrent technology, and ascribes content choice to users), went down after its servers were raided at a data center in Nacka station near Stockholm, Sweden.
This looked like one of the most serious threats yet to The Pirate Bay, which has been in operation since 2003, and which saw its founders found guilty of assisting copy right infringement in Sweden in 2009. A raid in 2006 ordered by the judge who later presided over that trial of the founders put the site down until the second of June 2006, and the site saw a huge increase in users in the years following that incident.
The December 9 raid from last year resulted in a number of mirrors and archives, including one from other leading torrent site IsoHunt, which also released a tool that would enable anyone who wanted to to build their own TPB mirror. Early this year, a countdown appeared ticking down to today’s date, suggesting a return of the site at the old domain. The website actually reappeared as its functional self Saturday, February 31.
As TorrentFreak reports, this version of The Pirate Bay is functionally very similar but lacks a moderation panel for TPB staff, which has resulted in some staff claiming that it isn’t the “real” deal. Said staff plan to launch their own, “official” version instead, but I’d say a good portion of TPB’s existing user base will stick with the familiar URL now that it’s resolving once again.
The big question now is what happens to site traffic (and torrent use) in general following this most recent raid: The last major one saw interest spike, though other factors were likely involved (affordability and availability of broadband spread, for instance). Early evidence suggests TPB’s closure had little effect on piracy rates even in the short-term, so long-term declines at least seem unlikely.
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