[Infowarrior] - Pirate Bay moves to Ascension Island

[Richard Forno]

Pirate Bay moves to Ascension Island following domain name seizure

http://rt.com/news/pirate-bay-ascension-island-027/

Published time: December 10, 2013 22:16 
Edited time: December 12, 2013 15:36

Under pressure once again from the entertainment industry, The Pirate Bay has upped sticks and moved to a new .AC domain, based on the isolated volcanic Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

The move comes after the website’s previous domain registry in Sint Maarten - a Dutch protectorate - was seized.

The Pirate Bay team said the website’s former .SX domain appears to have been seized overnight, TorrentFreak reported.

Operators quickly relocated to the piratebay.ac web address, which uses the Ascension Island’s country code top-level domain (ccTLD).

The Ascension Island domain is controlled by the UK. The Pirate Bay stressed that the island is not its final destination, adding that it will soon set sail for safer shores.

British authorities are not fans of The Pirate Bay; the website is routinely blocked by UK ISPs, according to the Inquirer, a European site for computer news.

TorrentFreak speculated that the domain seizure may be connected to the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which represents a number of copyright holders in the music, film, and gaming industries.

Last month, BREIN sent an email to The Pirate Bay’s founder, Fredrik Neij, telling him that the site infringes on the rights of copyright holders worldwide. The .SX domain name is controlled by the Netherlands, so BREIN has jurisdiction over it.

“We expressly point out that by registering domain names and using these and/or allowing these to be used by The Pirate Bay, you infringe on the rights of the Rights Owners. Therefore the Rights Owners hold you liable for the damages that they have suffered and will suffer from your actions,” the letter states. 

The letter gave The Pirate Bay until November 22 to shut down its website, and threatened a 25,000 euro (US$34,400) per day fine if the site remained online.

It is not clear whether BREIN is behind the current domain seizure, or if a new court order has been issued.

“The AC domain is directly connected to the UK, so it’s just a quick stop there,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak. The next destination for the infamous torrent site is the Peruvian .PE registry, which will become its fifth domain name in 2013. Once based in Sweden but fearing seizure by Swedish authorities, the site moved to Greenland, then to Iceland, before acquiring its .SX domain.

http://rt.com/news/pirate-bay-ascension-island-027/

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