The Pirate Bay switches domain to Greenland

Fans of illegal movie downloads and/or walruses have reason to rejoice. Last night, the infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay switched its domain from Sweden’s .se to Greenland’s .gl extension.

According to reporting by TorrentFreak, the move was made in anticipation of a potential domain seizure from Swedish authorities that would render the entire site inaccessible worldwide.

The domain switch is The Pirate Bay’s second in the past two years. In early 2012, the file site switched from its original .org extension to .se in order to evade U.S. authorities.

There will be little disruption from the point of view of torrent-consumers, as they will automatically be redirected to the new home at thepiratebay.gl. The Bay’s move will also come with a set of new IP-addresses, so many existing ISP blockades may—for the time being—be given the runaround.

According to Google’s Transparency Report, the company received 872,492 (and still counting) requests from copyright holders to block offending URLs from thepiratebay.se. However, copyright owners may already be starting to react to the Bay's new domain. Over the course of one day, Google has already registered four blocking requests aimed at thepiratebay.gl: three from indie music label Matador Records, and one from Rico Management (who apparently represents death metal bands in copyright issues).

:story: TechHive