Is The Pirate Bay gone for good?

Earlier this week Swedish Police raided a data center in Nacka, Stockholm to pull The Pirate Bay offline. TorrentFreak says its unclear if the site is coming back, and there's lots of confusion about how hard the site was hit. There are some reports making the rounds that The Pirate Bay is in the process of being resurrected at a brand new domain but these reports are wide of the mark as they point to proxy pages, or even pay sites, that aren't updated when The Pirate Bay is down.

There hasn’t been this much panic in the file-sharing world since 2006. Back then the cause was a huge police raid that targeted The Pirate Bay in its Swedish homeland. Now, eight years later, it’s deja vu all over again.

As everyone knows by now, yesterday morning Swedish police raided a data center in Nacka, Stockholm. A little time later The Pirate Bay disappeared offline and late last evening anti-piracy group Rights Alliance took responsibility for the complaint that forced the site offline.

In a follow up article, TorrentFreak reports many of the people who built up The Pirate Bay are happy to see it gone, including former spokesperson Peter Sunde. The site was originally created to bring BitTorrent to the masses, a goal that was completed a long time ago. The Pirate Bay was handed over to a new crew a few years ago and Sunde laments the site was turned into little more than a soulless cash cow:

“The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old designs. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse.”

The former Pirate Bay spokesman is happy to see the site on its knees. After it was handed over to the new crew a few years ago the site lost its soul, he believes.

That said, Peter regrets that it has gone down like this. The plan had always been to pull the plug after 10 years, so others could take over. However, when that day came last year the site remained online.

Sunde believes The Pirate Bay may be gone for good but hopes others will fill the gap.