Anticipating the seizure of domain by Swedish authorities, The Pirate Bay has moved it domain to Greenland, on a .GL domain. The domain transfer from .se to .gl was done overnight as Swedish authorities are gearing up to seize their Swedish domain name to render it inaccessible worldwide. In fact, TPB’s anticipation is quite accurate as last year, a Swedish court ordered the seizure of the p2ptv.se domain which was offering unauthorized live streams of hockey and soccer matches. So, it was a timely decision by TBP. However, much to the chagrin of TPB, Greenland took only 48 hours to temporarily shut down the new domain and fire off a warning against the sharing site.

Over the course of Monday night and Tuesday morning, ThePirateBay.se became ThePirateBay.gl, with the new TLD denoting Greenland, a huge country with a tiny population of just 57,000 people. But now, less than 48 hours later, the latest plan to bring domain stability to The Pirate Bay already requires a Plan B.

Exact timing is unclear, but very soon the site will lose use of both its .GL domains after Tele-Post, the company responsible for .GL registrations, said it would not allow them to be put to “illegal” use.

“Tele-Post has today decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” the company said in a statement received by TorrentFreak.

This is the second domain transfer for TBP in a year, as last year it transferred from .org domain to the Swedish .se domain. As of now, the users visiting TBP’s .se domain are being automatically redirected to the new home. Aside from a bookmark update, everything remains the same.

The dark clouds of censorship have been all over The Pirate Bay from a couple of months. Earlier last year, the founders of The Pirate Bay were finally ordered to prison for a 2009 conviction of facilitating copyright infringement in Sweden when the Swedish Supreme Court declined to change their sentences. In another ruling, UK High Court ordered ISPs to block customer access to The Pirate Bay. Amid the ISPs caught up in this order were Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media and this is the culmination of lawsuits by nine music labels including EMI, Polydor, Sony, Virgin and Warner who have sought a measure such as this to protect their copyrighted media from being copied.

The problem with compelling ISPs to blockade a website is not just that it doesn’t work, but that it disarms the citizens from making their own decisions as to what information they want to access. In the case of sites such as The Pirate Bay it also stifles and chills a great deal of legitimate sharing, distribution, and useful indexing of torrents. It’s been argued before that the backbone of search on the Internet, Google, Bing, and etc. all could be shown to facilitate copyright infringement in the same way that tracker sits such as TPB do.

[Co-authored by: Kyt Dotson and Isha Suri.]