The Pirate Bay has spent most of the year hopping from domain to domain in order to avoid being taken down by law enforcement, but a series of domain seizures over the last few months have whittled away the website’s arsenal, and now it’s being forced to use its .ORG and .SE domains. What’s funny is that these are the two domains that The Pirate Bay was trying to prevent from being seized in the first place, which is why it’s been using its .AM, .GD, .GS, .LA, .MN, and .VG domains. Now after months of dodging bullets, the website is right back where it started, and it needs to come up with a new plan quickly if it wants to stick around. The good news is that there are a number of Pirate Bay clones out there at the moment, but finding out which of them is trustworthy is a bit difficult for casual pirates.
How time flies. Just over a year ago The Pirate Bay was going through some of the most turbulent times in its entire history. Following a raid at a Swedish datacenter the site stayed offline for several weeks, an event that fueled the rise of endless ‘replacement’ sites. While many of the sites stepping up to fill the gap left by The Pirate Bay looked like the real deal, many were simply incomplete copies. To their credit, the operators of some of these sites were upfront about their status but others did everything they could to claim their place as the real Pirate Bay reincarnated. Of course, when the real Pirate Bay returned at the end of January 2015, many of these other sites questioned their place in the market. Were they needed anymore? Were they even wanted? As time pressed on many simply dissolved but others carried on either as a clone, proxy or mirror. While this kind of behavior had previously been encouraged by the operators of The Pirate Bay, it ended up causing huge confusion among casual users who had no idea which domains to trust. As previously highlighted, it contributed to a growing branding crisis among ‘pirate’ sites. However, after returning to its full glory in February 2015, The Pirate Bay put faith in its trusted ThePirateBay.se domain and watched its users do the same. But by May the site was in trouble again when the Stockholm District Court ordered that domain to be seized, pending an appeal.
