The Pirate Bay has announced that it is to duck out of the torrent hosting game and instead focus on offering magnet links to its users.

On the surface this looks like a bit of a blow for the soon-not-to-be-a file-hosting site, but it is actually a shrewd move by the folks behind The Pirate Bay as it will make the site harder to pin down in court for copyright infringement.

That's because a magnet link doesn't actually have any file information, just some data. Client apps then take this data and find the file associated with the link.

It's obvious why The Pirate Bay has chosen now to change tack: the site's owners have been refused an appeal to their charges for copyright infringement and this has meant a number of significant changes have had to happen.

(Not) breaking the law

The biggest of these changes was the change of the domain from thepiratebay.org to thepiratebay.se – this is so the site doesn't fall prey to any messy US laws.

The Pirate Bay will now be a lot leaner and in turn much easier to host, so expect a number of mirrored sites to pop up just in case the main site is blocked for any reason.

All of this adds up to yet another headache for the likes of the MPAA and the RIA. In short, by forcing The Pirate Bay to make changes, the site may well be stronger than ever.

"Quite some time ago we decided to not host torrent files anymore," said Pirate Bay about the change in direction.

"In following with that decision, we decided to make Magnet links the default option for the Download buttons!

"We've just changed places on the links. Magnet is now default, Download torrent is now where the magnet links used to be. The reason is the same as always: Magnets are now good enough to use, and it's not as easy to block as .torrent files. Also it saves us a huge amount of bandwidth!"

It also revealed that the site will be completely torrent free (unless the torrent is shared by 10 peers or under) as of 29 February.

Via Torrent Freak