The recording industry is busy going after smaller players in online copyright infringement, but they haven’t forgotten their old nemesis The Pirate Bay. A Swedish court will decide next week if The Pirate Bay should be stripped of its .se top-level domain (TLD) address, which would be a blow to the site. The Bay has resided at that domain for two years since the last offensive against its addresses. So, are they going to chase The Pirate Bay off the Internet?

The Pirate bay originally had a .org domain, but that was abandoned for good back in 2012. The site hopped from one domain to the next, covering .sx (Sint Maarten), .gy (Guyana), .pe (Peru), and .ac (Ascension Island) among others. Each time it felt threatened, the site would move again. It eventually came to rest at piratebay.se and thepiratebay.se in April 2013.

According to the case filed by Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad in Sweden — where the .se domain and The Pirate bay originate — the .se domain names assist site operators in perpetrating copyright infringement, and the Swedish government should take over the addresses. The Swedish government is basically suing the registrar. Those behind The Pirate Bay have stated in the past they have a number of domains in reserve in case it is forced to move again, but we don’t know if that was entirely true. We might find out soon, though.

Following a series of raids in past years, The Pirate Bay now runs on decentralized servers. Even if the site is shut down, it can be brought back online in fairly short order. An operation in December 2014 knocked The Pirate Bay offline for several weeks, but it eventually came back online at the same address like nothing had happened. If the court decides to block the site from using the .se TLD, users would have trouble finding The Pirate Bay, but not for long.

There are already a number of pirate proxy services that will connect those in countries that have blocked The Pirate Bay. All the torrents are listed as magnet links a few bytes in size, so the proxies don’t even have to be very fast. Swedish users of the site might be taking advantage of these sites soon. A Swedish ISP is fighting an order to begin blocking The Pirate Bay, a first in the site’s homeland. For those who aren’t blocked from accessing TPB directly, other sites maintain redirect links that will always point to the current Pirate Bay address.

The current action against The Pirate Bay’s domain is unique in that it’s the first time a state (Sweden in this case) has sued a registry for supporting criminal activity simply for providing a domain name. If it works, copyright holders might be able to use this as precedent to get more TPB domains yanked or to go after other sites. The cat and mouse game is far from over.