The Pirate Bay's Site Goes Back Online (With a Giant, Waving Flag For Now)

The ship might not quite be afloat yet, but it appears as if The Pirate Bay is slowly lumbering back to life following a December 9 raid by Swedish police that took the site offline.

While you can't find the typical listings of BitTorrent downloads on The Pirate Bay's primary domain right now, thepiratebay.se, the domain, at least, is a lot more accessible than it was previously. Now, instead of a "site not found" error, viewers are treated to the giant image of a pirate flag waving in the breeze.

The move, as reported by TorrentFreak, suggests that The Pirate Bay might be close to a full return. The site appears to now be hosted on a server in Moldova—or, at least, that's the first stop in who knows what kind of a configuration the site's keepers have set up, according to domain name records that were reconfigured this morning.

It's also possible that there's some kind of partnership being worked out between The Pirate Bay and isohunt.to, the latter being the ones behind The Open Bay initiative that launched in the wake of The Pirate Bay's absence. That initiative allows anyone to make their own copy of The Pirate Bay; presumably, the goal is to create a ton of Pirate Bay mirrors so it's impossible for any one country or host to permanently strip the site off the Web.

"We, the team that brought you Isohunt.to and oldpiratebay.org, are bringing you the next step in the torrent evolution. Open Pirate Bay source code. History of torrent sites such as Isohunt and The Pirate Bay gives us a lesson that would be a crime not to learn. The era of individual torrent sites is over," reads a description on The Open Bay's website.

"That is why we created Pirate Bay open source. It's free for everyone. Now you can create your own copy of The Pirate Bay! Update and change this code to make it better for everyone."

Also, the same waving pirate flag graphic on The Open Bay's site is also the one being used over at thepiratebay.se. Coincidence… or collusion?

While you might think that the return of one of the more well-known BitTorrent sites has media executives biting their fingernails, in actuality, the loss of The Pirate Bay didn't seem to have much of an effect (if any) on global piracy rates.