Notorious torrent tracker website The Pirate Bay went offline in early December when its server facility near Stockholm, Sweden was raided by local authorities. This event appeared to be a sad end to what was a years-long battle between The Pirate Bay and copyright interests, which have been lobbying governments and ISPs (UK ISP block, Dutch ISP blocks) for some time to shut down the website.

In the years the site ran, nothing, it seemed, could kill The Pirate Bay; until the site went offline after the Swedish police raid.

And it now looks like The Pirate Bay is still nigh-unkillable.

According to TorrentFreak the ressurection started small: two weeks after the raid The Pirate Bay’s web domain came back with a flapping pirate flag and a countdown timer that suggested a launch date of February 1st.

Then, yesterday, one day ahead of schedule the website reappeared using its old .se domain. The site appears to have suffered extremely minimal data loss from the raid.

In homage to its resurrection, the site features a phoenix logo. The phoenix is the ever-resurrecting bird of fire from Greek mythology that rises anew from its own ashes in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth.

A screenshot of the newly reborn The Pirate Bay

The site appears largely intact, with torrents already searchable and populated. The last addition to the database appears to be from December 9, 2014—the same day as the raid. The only damage so far appears to be that the RSS feed returns a 404 page not found error.

The About page claims that The Pirate Bay is “the world’s largest bittorrent indexer;” and it may have been in the past and is certainly the world’s most famous.

While the site is a constant target of intellectual property lobbies and organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America (and the international forms thereof) The Pirate Bay does not host any copyrighted material itself: only links to torrents on the BitTorrent network that allow users to download files.

“No torrent files are saved at the server,” states the About page. “That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the site.”

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer Internet file sharing protocol that allows rapid transmission of data between networked users, each of whom become receivers and transmitters of the data in question. The technology is used in numerous software applications that need to move considerable amounts of data between large numbers of users including Blizzard Entertainment’s games World of Warcraft, Diablo III, and StarCraft II, Wargaming.net’s World of Tanks, and CCP Games’s EvE Online.

The Pirate Bay is also no means the only “torrent tracker” website, numerous others exist that allow easy searching for materials put onto the BitTorrent network.

Copyright holder lobbies such as the MPAA and RIAA argue against the presence of The Pirate Bay as it, and the BitTorrent protocol, can be used broadly to “facilitate in copyright infringement.”

These copyright interests have met with limited success in taking sites such as The Pirate Bay offline—as is obvious from the resurgence of the site.

photo credit: pirates april2011 15 via photopin