The original home of The Pirate Bay, probably the Web’s highest-profile site for copyrighted movies, music, and software, is no longer online.
However, at least a placeholder is alive on a Costa Rican domain—though not much more than that.
TorrentFreak first noted the outage. The site’s reporters said that they had received a statement from Paul Pintér, Sweden’s police national coordinator for IP enforcement, claiming that there had been a raid on a server room owned by The Pirate Bay at a site in Stockholm.
According to earlier reporting from the site, however, The Pirate Bay had moved to a cloud-based infrastucture that used 21 “virtual servers” controlled by a load balancer. The idea, according to The Pirate Bay, was that the distributed architecture would make it “raid-proof,” as the site could simply be moved from domain to domain. Whether that’s the case or not, time will tell.
The Pirate Bay’s Twitter feed has gone dark since Dec. 3. Related sites, such Suprbay.org, are also offline, as are Bayimg.com and Pastebay.net. The mobile version of The Pirate Bay, themobilebay.org, also timed out when PCWorld tried to access it.
Want to learn more about the history of The Pirate Bay? Check out the timeline that TechHive constructed last year.
Why this matters: The Pirate Bay has served both as a rallying point both for those who are too cheap to pay for electronic media as well as more civic-minded folk who used the site as a form or protest against increasingly draconian copyright laws.The Pirate Bay has always touted itself as the “most resilient” pirate site on the Web; we’ll find out exactly how resilient over the course of the next few days, it seems.