The Pirate Bay has flirted with North Korea on more than one occasion. While most attempts were practical jokes, in its early days the notorious site came close to actually hosting its servers on North Korean soil through a connection at the country's embassy in Sweden.

Last year The Pirate Bay made headlines all over the wold when the site seemingly relocated to North Korea.

After a few days the move turned out to be an elaborate hoax, much like the April Fools prank a few years earlier. However, during its early days the notorious torrent site came awfully close to actually having a server on North Korean soil.

This previously unknown fact was brought up by Pirate Bay co-founder Tobias Andersson during a talk in Melbourne, Australia, last week. TF reached out to Andersson to learn more about how the ambitious plan came to be.

The Pirate Bay co-founder explains that the TPB team wanted to host a server in the North Korean embassy in Stockholm, where they had a contact at the time.

“This was way back in the beginning. Probably around 2004-2005. Back then, the site didn’t need the insane amounts of bandwidth it would later on,” Andersson tells TF.

At the time the site had just turned a year old and with its rising popularity the legal threats from U.S. companies increased as well. The Pirate Bay already had a name for ridiculing copyright holders in their replies to takedown notices, but with the North Korea plan they could up the ante.

“In 2004 the site was still young and cocky. So when an opportunity appeared that obviously would piss off the US government, we didn’t want to miss it,” Andersson tells us.

North Korea’s embassy in Sweden

Through a friend, The Pirate Bay team was introduced to an employee at the North Korean embassy who would be able to take a server inside in exchange for a small fee. The people working there didn’t receive any pay and were only compensated for basic necessities, so a little bit of extra income was welcome for them.

For the TPB team this was a unique opportunity to host their servers on North Korean soil to shield the site from local law enforcement and piss off the U.S., so they went ahead.

“Needless to say, we loved the idea,” Andersson recalls.

“We thought, why not host a server or two at the embassy? If not all of them, perhaps at least some of the frontend servers, so that when the cops, media and Hollywood searched for them, they’d end up in the most hostile and isolated countries in the world.”

There was one downside to this idea though. The original Pirate Bay crew, which consisted of anarchists and hackers, wasn’t really eager to be associated with one of the most repressive regimes in the world.

“Of course we considered that. But in this case we couldn’t resist the epicness of this raised middle finger to Hollywood, so we wanted to give it a go,” Andersson says.

The first contact was made with the embassy via email. Initially things looked positive but when they got ready to discuss the finer details all emails bounced back, and the plan went bust.

What exactly happened to the embassy employee remains a mystery up until today.

“We later found out that he had been sent back to North Korea. No idea if it was because of us or just a normal thing for them. But that’s where our real cooperation with North Korea ended. The rest that would come were just April Fools jokes and trolling,” Andersson says.

After 2004 The Pirate Bay never got close to a real North Korean uplink. The site has been hosted in quite a few exotic places though, and in 2011 it eventually settled for a cloud based solution for most of the server power.

Where the servers are located today is unknown, but there is a rumor going around that some are floating around on drones…