More than two weeks have passed since The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided by Swedish authorities, pulling the site permanently offline.

In the wake of this shutdown, as many as 400 Pirate Bay clone websites have cropped up, with most of the copies based on the new IsoHunt’s oldpiratebay.org, an archive of every Torrent uploaded to The Pirate Bay, as well as the group’s recent OpenBay project.

In an interview with Torrent Freak, a Torrent-focused blog, the group behind IsoHunt explained they have had no contact with The Pirate Bay regarding this new project. However, the flag currently situated on The Pirate Bay’s home page is pulled from OpenBay, so it’s likely that the legally-embattled Pirate Bay symbolically approves of IsoHunt’s OpenBay project.

The most prominent of Pirate Bay clones seems to be the Costa Rica-hosted thepiratebay.cr, although the .cr domain name has never been associated with the official Pirate Bay. Also, Pirate Bay has stated it still has control of its .se domain name – the most recent address of the website before it was taken down – so there’s little reason for Pirate Bay’s owners to switch to a new domain. There are also rumours circulating that some of these Pirate Bay clones could be created by government and law enforcement agencies in an effort to gain the personal information of downloaders.

When one Torrent hosting website disappears many others take its place. The question is whether or not Pirate Bay copies will replace the void the original Pirate Bay has left in the Torrent sharing community. Much of the site’s popularity was related to its reliable content uploaders and vigilant moderators, aspects of the original Pirate Bay that likely won’t be recreated with these clones.

In an interview during the height of Pirate Bay’s popularity, one of its founders, Peter Sunde, discussed the Internet’s Hyrdra-like nature.

“Start up your own torrent sites, make the Internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shutdown,” Sunde said, emphasizing that Torrent communities shouldn’t be relying so much on Pirate Bay, and that it is necessary for other prominent torrent hosting websites to emerge.

Sunde is no longer associated with the website and recently served five months in prison – after evading law enforcement for five years – for his involvement with Pirate Bay as one of the site’s key owners.

Just a few days ago Pirate Bay’s official domain began displaying the image of a waving pirate flag accompanied by a mysterious countdown clock, so perhaps an official Pirate Bay revival could still be in the works.

OpenBay is one of the most popular projects on popular collaboration platform, Github.

Follow @Patrick_ORourke.