In their attempts to stay one step ahead and whatever legal organizations are currently actively trying to shut them down, the Pirate Bay has a habit of cycling through top-level domains. For example, they had piratebay.se for quite some time, but recently fled to Iceland with piratebay.is. Looks like their time in Iceland might be up, though, as they’ve apparently fled to piratebay.sx — Sint Maarten — in an attempt to avoid any sort of legal shenanigans.
This comes in response to Fredrik Ingblad, a Swedish prosecutor, filing a motion in Sweden requesting the seizure of both the Sweden and Iceland domains. It’s entirely possible that the Swedish TLD would have been rounded up in this motion, but it’s pretty unlikely that piratebay.is would have been included. Iceland isn’t exactly down for letting other governments tell them what to do.
Iceland’s domain registry previously told TorrentFreak that they wouldn’t suspend a domain name without being ordered to by an Icelandic court, and that they’re ultimately not responsible for how a user decides to use their domain. On the other hand, Ingblad apparently believes Sweden has jurisdiction because the .is domain is registered to Fredrik Neij, since he has Swedish nationality.
It’s honestly pretty shaky ground to stand on, and Iceland probably wouldn’t cave to that kind of pressure, but the folks behind Pirate Bay are apparently taking no chances. With that in mind, they’ve moved to piratebay.sx — a Sint Maarten TLD. For those not familiar, that’s a tiny island to the east of Puerto Rico that’s controlled half by France and half by the Netherlands.
Whether they stay at piratebay.sx for very long remains to be seen.
(via TorrentFreak)
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Published: Apr 30, 2013 03:35 pm