Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was visited in prison last week by police questioning him as part of a new criminal investigation into The Pirate Bay. The case is said to involve several publishing houses as well as Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån. According to information received by TorrentFreak the authorities are focusing on events from 2011 and 2012, when Gottfrid was no longer working on the BitTorrent site.

Last week The Pirate Bay switched to a new Iceland-based domain name.

The Pirate Bay team said it suspected that the authorities were gearing up to seize the site’s .se domain, and it turns out that these suspicions were justified.

New information reveals that police are gathering information as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the world’s largest file-sharing site.

A few days ago Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was questioned by police in prison. The officers, who brought along Gottfrid’s attorney, were particularly interested in his involvement in the site between 2011 and 2012.

According to information from reliable sources, the new investigation involves several publishing houses as well as Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån. Well-known anti-piracy prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad is said to be leading the case.

The publishing houses asked the police to question the Pirate Bay founder in prison, where he is serving his sentence for an earlier Pirate Bay case. They did so last Monday and during the visit Gottfrid explained to them that The Pirate Bay was not hosted in Sweden between 2011 and 2012.

The authorities dropped their suspicions a few days later, and informed the Pirate Bay founder that he was no longer an active suspect.

The 2011/2012 time-frame mentioned by the investigators suggests that this could be the same case from which details leaked last year. At the time The Pirate Bay said it had information showing that the authorities were planning a raid on the site’s servers.

A year later The Pirate Bay is still up and running and it’s unknown what progress the authorities have made since then.

Last fall The Pirate Bay moved most of its infrastructure to the cloud, making it harder to shut the site down. Even if all cloud servers were to be shut down, it can simply move to a new provider and continue there.

“Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak at the time.

Gottfrid, meanwhile, will have served his Pirate Bay sentence next month. Upon release he will be arrested again for hacking related charges, and this new case that will go to trial in a few weeks.