Just like their seafaring historical counterparts, internet pirates are adept at staying a step ahead of the law.

This week The Pirate Bay – the web’s most notable file-sharing website – was almost captured in the Caribbean, before retreating to regroup at a tiny island in the South Atlantic.

The website, which originated in Sweden, had been operating from the domain thepiratebay.sx, based in Sint Maarten, the Dutch half of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. On Monday night, however, that domain was seized by the authorities, and the website fled instead to thepiratebay.ac, a domain belonging to Ascension Island, a windswept volcanic outcrop just south of the Equator, some 1,000 miles from the coast of Africa.

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The British-owned island is home to under 900 people, including the population of RAF Ascension Island, a Royal Air Force station that played a crucial strategic role for the Allied forces in World War Two, and for the British military during the Falklands War.

While Ascension has now proven to be a safe harbour for The Pirate Bay, too, it is only the website’s online address that has moved there, not its physical operations or staff. And, given that the UK is hostile to web piracy, the visit is expected to be little more than a stopover before the site sets sail again.

A Pirate Bay insider told the file-sharing blog Torrent Freak that the site’s next destination would be Peru, and a .pe domain name. The site’s operators say they still have dozens of other domains to which they could escape.

The Pirate Bay catalogues links to torrent files for films, television shows, music, games and other media, which are often shared in breach of copyright. The website’s front page features an image of a pirate ship, flying a sail ironically emblazoned with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign, Home Taping Is Killing Music.

The site has now been forced to move homes five times in 2013 alone to avoid falling foul of copyright laws. In April, it switched domains from Sweden to Greenland and later Iceland, before heading south to the warmer climes of Sint Maarten. According to Torrent Freak, its latest eviction was the work of the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which had lobbied the local authorities to act.

The Pirate Bay was founded in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån. In 2007 its founders set up a fund to buy Sealand, a “micronation” established on a World War Two fort in the North Sea near Suffolk, whose owners had decided to offer their tiny state for sale. Yet the Sealander government rejected The Pirate Bay’s approaches.

In 2009, The Pirate Bay’s four founders were tried in Stockholm for facilitating illegal downloads of copyrighted material. They were sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of 30 million Swedish Krona (£2.8m). Their prison sentences were reduced on appeal the following year, but the fine was raised to 46 million SEK.

The piracy movement nonetheless remains especially strong in Sweden. The Pirate Bay has links to the political Pirate Party, which won more than 7 per cent of the Swedish vote at the 2009 European Parliament election, and now has two MEPs.