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The Pirate Bay’s Swedish domains to be seized

By | Published on Thursday 21 May 2015

The Pirate Bay

The Stockholm District Court has ordered that two key domains used by the always controversial Pirate Bay – including the service’s flagship thepiratebay.se domain – should be handed over to the Swedish authorities.

The seizing of domains used by copyright infringing websites has become a common tactic in the entertainment industry’s battle against piracy, though how easy it is to take grab the domains of offending sites varies from country to country. There has been talk of The Pirate Bay losing its flagship domain in home country Sweden for a few years, but it took legal action against the organisation that controls the .se domain – Punkt SE – to make it happen.

Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, who was also behind the raid that knocked the Bay offline for a time late last year, led on that legal action, arguing that the file-sharing service is an illegal operation and its .se domains were therefore tools used to conduct copyright infringement. More over, Ingblad argued, Punkt SE should be held liable for the misuse of domains in its control.

Punkt SE countered that there was no legal basis for suggesting it was in anyway liable for the activities of individuals or organisations using a .se domain, and when it came to seizing the domains of copyright infringing sites, that was an ineffective way of dealing with piracy, because sites can quickly reappear at another web address, which will be just as quickly listed by the search engines, making it easy for file-sharers to relocate the set up.

After hearing arguments from both sides last month, the Stockholm court rejected the idea Punkt SE was in anyway liable for the actions of The Pirate Bay, but it did order that the domains be handed to state prosecutors, mainly because they are actually registered to TPB co-founder Fredrik Neij who was found personally guilty of copyright crimes back in 2009.

According to Torrentfreak, the court ruled: “Fredrik Neij has participated in [copyright] crimes that have been identified and he is the actual holder of the domain names. It is therefore no obstacle to confiscate domain names from him. The prosecutor’s primary claim with respect to Fredrik Neij should be upheld and domain names should be confiscated from him in accordance with the Copyright Act”.

While copyright industry groups have welcomed the ruling, thepiratebay.se still seems to be working just at the moment, and The Pirate Bay has decorated its home page with all the alternative domains it controls around the world, preparing users for the day the Swedish domain redirects to a stern government notice.



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