Just last week, we heard that one of the world’s most popular and most visited torrent website The Pirate Bay’s. SE domain name expired and, soon after, it was deactivated. But, today the iconic domain, thepiratebay.se, is back in action.
According to latest reports by TorrentFreak, the Pirate Bay’s .SE domain is active and running and is redirecting all its visitors to the original .org domain – ‘thepiratebay.org’.
A quick look at the Whois information shows that the Pirate Bay’s .SE domain has been reactivated on October 23, 2017, and the registration updated to October next year (October 7, 2018). This means that it’s safe, at least for a while.
TorrentFreak has been speculating about the development, and why it came back after being locked and allowed to expire. It suggests that this may have been done on behalf of the Swedish Court of Appeals based on a currently pending case on domain name battle.
For those unaware, The Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.org) is a torrent website that distributes copyrighted material such as movies, music, and games. However, the website has faced several shutdowns and domain seizures due to violations of copyright law, making them switch to various other web addresses to avoid seizures or other legal threats and continue their operation. One such address is ‘Thepiratebay.se’, a Swedish domain for a Swedish website.
Back in 2013, a local anti-piracy group in Sweden had filed a motion asking to seize control of thepiratebay.se. This resulted in a lengthy legal battle where the Swedish Court of Appeal eventually ruled that The Pirate Bay’s .SE domain had to be confiscated and forfeited to the state. As the Supreme Court appeal is still pending, the lockdown on the .SE domain prohibited the Pirate Bay’s owners from changing the domain details, as speculated by TorrentFreak, which may be why it expired initially on October 7, 2017
According to them, since the domain’s forfeiture has yet to take place, the domain would have to be made available to the public again. This means that outsiders could pick it up, which isn’t supposed to happen, and this is likely why it’s now active again.
