The Pirate Bay made a defiant return Saturday, seven weeks after a police raid shut down the infamous file-sharing website.

Screenshot by CNET

The site, which allows users to download television shows, movies, games and other files, had been down since December 9. Two weeks later, a temporary homepage went back up with a countdown to February 1, according to TorrentFreak, which first reported the site was back up.

The Pirate Bay is known for allegedly abetting the piracy of copyrighted material -- and court battles over bans of the site have been going on in several countries for years. When the site was shut down in December, it was unclear if it would go back up. Today, the site features an image of a phoenix in the place of its trademark pirate ship logo.

Swedish police had cracked down on The Pirate Bay's premises in Stockholm because of violations of copyright law.

The raid came barely a month after the arrest of the final of the website's co-founders on the Thailand-Laos border on November 3, and only a couple of days after Google Play's takedown of a number of apps related to The Pirate Bay.

It's not clear how the site has managed to reappear after the raid, but when it caught wind of an earlier possible police shutdown, back in 2012, it ditched its servers and moved all its content to several cloud-hosting providers in different countries around the world.

"Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary," the site wrote in a blog post at the time.

The Pirate Bay continues to operate using a ".se" domain, which is the Internet country code for Sweden. But the site has apparently faked its Net address in the past, using technical tricks. In 2013, for instance, a German programmer said the site's claim that it was operating out of North Korea was a spoof.

Update, 12:44 p.m. PT: Adds information.