Ahoy, the Pirate Bay Has Returned

In a move that surely has anti-piracy experts thinking, “Argh, matey,” the world’s most popular file-sharing website, the Pirate Bay, has resurfaced after nearly two months offline, reports Venture Beat. The site shuttered in mid-December after police stormed its central data hub in Stockholm, Sweden, following a criminal complaint filed by Rights Alliance, a Scandinavian anti-piracy collective, which said in a statement that the Pirate Bay capitalized on infringing content from outside parties.

The raid left the future of the Pirate Bay—which allowed users to upload and download content via torrents—in the air. A few days after the site was shuttered, the Pirate Bay released a statement acknowledging that it didn’t know if the site would ever resurface. But it did begin slowly rematerializing, first with a reactivated domain in late December and then with a digital clock that was counting down until February 1, which users suspected was a re-launch date. The site is fully functional now, and the data saved on the site before the December 9 raid is intact.

Users have noted that the site’s familiar pirate ship logo has vanished, and the new one is appropriate: a phoenix, rising from the ashes of the e-void. But the relaunch may be ruffling a few feathers, too. A report from earlier this week says that the re-launch comes at the expense of downsizing, and the new Pirate Bay will lay off many of the moderators and administrators who were a core part of the team for the past 10 years.

Former staff member WTC-SWE, a senior administrator, insisted that the new launch is not the Pirate Bay that users remember. “Some dickhead decided to take TPB crew out of the picture,” he said in an interview with Torrent Freak. “He thinks a site can be run without any staff at all and at the same time keeping up with fake [links], internal issues etc.” He went on to say that former staff members are gearing up to properly re-vamp the site using a different domain.

Regardless of its level of authenticity, the new Pirate Bay will likely be tougher to shutter this time: the website is hosted by a series of virtual servers worldwide, contained in top-secret cloud storage, reports The Verge. Since the Pirate Bay doesn’t have a physical server room, authorities won’t be able to raid a specific location. What could possibly tear the Pirate Bay apart is a mutiny, but that remains to be seen.