We brought you the news two weeks ago that the Pirate Bay had attempted to move to a Greenland domain, .gl, in the hope of future-proofing itself in the likely event that its .se Sweden domain gets confiscated by the Swedish authorities. However, the Pirate Bay were thrown out of Greenland within a day thanks to a Danish Supreme Court ruling made previously about illegal file sharing sites.
That left the Pirate Bay in a precarious situation of not being able to find a useable back-up domain to host the website from in the event of www.thepiratebay.se being seized. Consequently, the search for a new domain continued until the latest domain acquisition, which comes in the form of an Icelandic domain, www.thepiratebay.is. The Pirate Bay hope to have found a safe haven for themselves in Iceland.
Iceland have stated that it is not within their jurisdiction to suspend the domain www.thepiratebay.is unless a court order is brought forward against it. When asked whether Iceland would follow Greenland’s lead ISNIC (Iceland’s Domain Registry Company) said this to TorrentFreak:
“The short answer is no. Such an action would require a formal order from an Icelandic court. ISNIC is not responsible for a registrant’s usage of their domains,”
Funnily enough a similar thing happened with WikiLeaks when they were worried about their domain names being seized. They managed to acquire a .is domain to which ISNIC said it is the domain owner’s responsibility to abide by the law – not theirs.
So for the forseeable future expect the Pirate Bay to be available on .se and .is domains until they are confiscated. The Pirate Bay will no doubt continue to survive as long as enough domains exist.
