The Pirate Bay appears to be back online after more than a month of being offline without explanation from the creators. Visiting the domain, which is blocked by default by the vast majority of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the UK, displayed a message from Cloudflare stating that the “connection timed out.” According to piracy-focused blog TorrentFreak, the downtime was caused by a technical error.
Whatever was impacting the main domain seems to be resolved. It is now up-and-running.
The creators behind The Pirate Bay appear to have made a few tweaks to the infamous site during the downtime, TorrentFreak has reported. While they had previously said the unintentional downtime would enable them to implement some changes to the torrent repository – now that everything is back up-and-running, it doesn’t seem like they had time to change much.
Anyone expecting a huge visual overhaul to the site will be sorely disappointed.
Instead, the team behind the website, which offers visitors access to torrent files for hundreds of different applications, albums, videos, and more, has stripped away a number of links that previously featured on the homepage. Most noticeably, the Blog and About webpage – which once prominently featured on the simplistic homepage, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Google’s – have now vanished completely.
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Not only that, but the Login and Register shortcuts have also been ditched from the homepage, which suggests that Pirate Bay is no longer interested in getting its users to sign-up with an email address. It also might suggest that not many people were signing up as users, which led Pirate Bay to decide to can the entire feature.
Of course, it’s likely that the team behind the Pirate Bay are still busy working on changes for the site.
Given that Pirate Bay hasn’t substantially changed in years, it’s likely due to see more changes in the coming months and years.
The return of the infamous site will likely reassure a number of regular Pirate Bay users, who have expressed concern in its forums that this could be the final nail in the coffin for the surprisingly resilient piracy hub, which was shutdown back in December 2014 when Swedish police seized servers, computers, and other equipment used to power the service.
Interestingly, a number of other popular torrent sites rely on uploads to The Pirate Bay to refresh their own inventory. So, even if you’ve never visited The Pirate Bay, it’s possible that files you’re downloading over torrents are coming from the infamous Swedish site.
It’s worth pointing out that downloading via torrents isn’t illegal. Torrents are small files that contain the keys to downloading whatever content you’re after.
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It points you in the direction of users across the world with the content saved on their machine, so you can download whatever video, software, or music you’re looking for in small parts from hundreds or thousands of others. As such, you’ll need a separate torrent app to make sense of these files and download the actual content to your machine.
Using this system to download copyright-protected material without paying or gaining permission from the rightsholder is illegal.
Downloading and streaming (which is essentially temporarily downloading to your machine) are the same offence. Despite what some still mistakenly believe, there is no legal “grey area” around streaming rather than downloading.
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