The Pirate Bay’s announcement that it has laid down anchor in North Korea may just be a hoax as Europe forces the mutinous bit torrent tracker into choppy waters over the legality of its operations.

After being forced out of Sweden, file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has announced a new and rather surprising location for its servers: North Korea.

The website claimed in a statement published on its blog that Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un had invited it to North Korea.

“This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high,” The Pirate Bay said. “And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.”

A Pirate Bay insider told website TorrentFreak that they had been working for a while to get connectivity in North Korea.

“We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country,” the source said.

Despite TorrentFreak acknowledging that “the site does indeed route through North Korea at the moment," many experts have expressed doubts the report is true.



First, Pyongyang has not confirmed it.



Then, according to a German programmer contacted by the web tech journal Cnet, The Pirate Bay service is actually using something what is called IP spoofing. IP spoofing is where it seems the site’s IP address is in Pyongyang, North Korea, but in fact it is still being hosted from a site somewhere in Europe.

Another anonymous programmer told the online tech journal Digital Trends that he backward engineered the signal and traced the hosting to somewhere in Asia, probably Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, but not North Korea.

The Guardian also quoted analysis conducted by The Next Web suggesting that The Pirate Bay was most likely still being routed through Europe.

“The individuals behind the Pirate Bay are unlikely to trade speed for the chance to say the site is hosted in North Korea. They are more likely to hack around and can claim it regardless of whether it's true.”

Last week anti-piracy groups forced the Swedish Pirate Party to deny service to The Pirate Bay. It was then offered refuge by the pirate parties of Norway and Catalonia, but the Norwegian party apparently dropped the site earlier on Monday.

Over the past year, The Pirate Bay has been trying to stop getting shut down by the police. Last February it got rid of its torrents and started using magnet links, and last October it binned its servers and took up with several cloud-hosting providers in various countries around the world. This has made its data more secure in theory since it’s not just being hosted in one place.