The Pirate Bay has received indications that the Swedish authorities might soon attempt to seize the site's .se domain. In anticipation of this move, today the world's largest file-sharing site switched to Greenland's .gl domain. The move comes with a set of new IP-addresses which raises the possibility that existing ISP blockades might be bypassed, at least temporarily.

The Pirate Bay switched to a new domain overnight, from the Swedish based .se to Greenland’s .gl extension. The move to thepiratebay.gl will be permanent.

A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that the change was made in anticipation of a domain name seizure in Sweden. The BitTorrent site suspects that the authorities are gearing up to seize their Swedish domain name to render it inaccessible worldwide.

This is not just a hypothetical threat. Last year a Swedish court ordered the seizure of the p2ptv.se domain which was offering unauthorized live streams of hockey and soccer matches. The prosecutor in this case, which is under appeal, suggested that a similar procedure could also be used to take out The Pirate Bay.

The change will bring little new for regular users of The Pirate Bay. Visitors to the site will be automatically redirected to its new home, and aside from a bookmark update everything will remain the same.

For users whose access to the infamous torrent site was previously blocked, the switch has the potential to bring good news. In addition to a new domain name The Pirate Bay is also operating from a fresh set of IP-addresses. This raises the possibility that blockades already in place may be bypassed, at least temporarily.

The domain change is perhaps most frustrating for copyright holders and DMCA takedown services. Over the past year rightsholders have removed 870,923 Pirate Bay urls from Google and to keep the content blocked all requests will have to be resubmitted for the new domain.

For TPB this is the second domain change in little more than a year. Early 2012 the site traded in their .org domain for the Swedish .se domain to stay outside the reach of US authorities. With a few dozen alternative domains in backup, this might not be the last time this trick is played.

The Whac-A-Mole continues….

Update: The static IP-addresses still appear to be the old ones, so for most blocked users The Pirate Bay will only load partially.

Update: The domain / IP change caused some proxies to stop working on connections where The Pirate Bay is blocked (sometimes redirecting to a “blocked” page).