After being offline for more than six weeks the crew of The Pirate Bay has provided a new teaser suggesting the site's return. With just 10 days of a countdown left, ThePirateBay.se now shows the site's familiar and iconic homepage with active links to PirateBrowser and PromoBay.

For friends and foe alike, the past 44 days have resulted in a will it / won’t it return guessing game surrounding The Pirate Bay.

The self-styled “world’s most resilient torrent site” put a dent in its own billing by going down after a December 9 raid and failing to return. But that has done little to stop speculation that something is on the way.

Via a web server in Moldova, those behind the site have been posting various hints and teasers suggesting that the current downtime will come to an end in roughly 10 days time. Whether that will actually be the case remains to be seen, but new changes today have certainly excited observers.

As can be seen from the image above, ThePirateBay.se has today reverted to a much more familiar look. With the earlier black and waving full-page pirate flag shrunk to fit a box in the center of the screen, its surroundings are now almost identical to the layout in place when the site went down in December.

Returned but currently grayed out are the well-worn torrent browsing features, categories, preferences and languages. PirateBrowser and PromoBay links are active, however. These and the familiar Pirate Bay logo are now bordered by two features that have welcomed visitors for the past several weeks.

At the bottom of the page the notorious Pirate galleon continues to sail towards its island destination (now renamed welcomehome.png) and up top the countdown timer continues inexorably towards its February 1 conclusion.

Other technical changes include the implementation of a Cloudflare protected front end for the site, although TF can confirm that the site is still based at Trabia, the Republic of Moldova’s largest datacenter.

While it seems unlikely that Pirate Bay will stay in that location should it return next week, the company behind the site’s hosting has already laid down some pointers.

“We do support freedom of speech and barrier-free Internet usage. In the same time we operate a strict zero-tolerance abuse policy which is part of our terms of service on which all services we provide to our clients are based,” the company said in a statement.

“This means that our clients have to obey national and international laws. In case our clients violate this by abusing our services they are suspended and/or terminated if necessary.”

Given the site’s current status (no sharing features whatsoever) Trabia says that no action against the site is needed. The company does note, however, that Moldova’s copyright law of 2010 can require a host to take action against sites that violate the rights of third parties. Nevertheless, the issue may not be straightforward in the case of The Pirate Bay.

“The problem here is that the technology used, so called ‘magnet links’, is not violating the right of 3rd parties directly,” the company says.

“[There] is actually no copyright infringement originating from websites such as ‘thepiratebay.se’ which makes it a very complex case which is open for a lot of interpretation and discussions. We stand behind all our clients as long as they use our services for a legal purpose,” Trabia concludes.

In the meantime the Swedish investigation into the site continues and is likely to take months to complete. Millions hope the site’s return will precede the investigation’s conclusion.