Following threats of legal action in its traditional home of Sweden, a few hours ago The Pirate Bay set sail for pastures new. Sweden's Pirate Party had been providing bandwidth to the site for the last three years but came under intense pressure last week when a local anti-piracy group threatened to sue. The Swedish pirates have now stepped aside and handed the responsibilities to pirate parties in Norway and Spain.

When it comes to hosting a website there are thousands of companies and organizations around the world open for business. However, the options reduce massively when your site is internationally infamous.

For this reason The Pirate Bay has been hosted in many countries over the years, hopping across borders when one country or another became intolerant to its activities. As legal and political pressure mounted on the site its options narrowed further, with the threat of police raids eventually forcing even more drastic countermeasures.

For a while now the site’s true location has been unknown, hidden away in a far-off cloud and identifiable only by the connections it makes with the outside world. However, the site has to come up for air somewhere and for the last three years the site has received its Internet connectivity from Scandinavia, courtesy of the Swedish Pirate Party.

With the actual site located who-knows-where, last week the Pirate Party received the call they had been expecting. Local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance told the pirates and other Internet companies further up the chain that continuing to work with The Pirate Bay beyond Tuesday 26 would result in legal action.

Rights Alliance have the backing of the world’s largest movie and music companies and fighting them in court would be a huge burden for the Swedish Pirate Party, one that would sap their resources and divert them from their mission. So, reluctantly, the Swedish pirates have now stopped hosting The Pirate Bay, but not before a new plan was put into action.

Sometime earlier today the ropes connecting the Pirate Bay galleon to the shores of Sweden were cut and the ship sailed away into the sunset. And then, as if by magic, it split into two parts and docked in two brand new ports.

With a seamless transition The Pirate Bay is now being serviced by the pirate parties of Norway and Catalunya.

“TPB did of course have lots of backup transit lined up for ages. This is however the first time we are going to show two at the same time,” The Pirate Bay’s Winona told TorrentFreak.

“It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-interneterians will understand that they can’t win a fight when they have the people against them.”

The decision to choose Norway and Spain as locations for The Pirate Bay is perhaps best viewed through the prism of recent court action in the former and a complete lack of action in the latter.

Following initial pressure and a court case in 2009, the IFPI and several movie studios failed to force local ISP Telenor to block The Pirate Bay. Their 2010 appeal was also rejected when the court found that there was no legal basis to force Telenor to block the site. While that ruling on ISP liability will be of some comfort to the Norwegian pirates, the position could change if the law is amended.

But of course there’s a backup – Spain.

Despite introducing new legislation after the US threatened to place it on a trade blacklist, Spain currently offers a favorable environment for file-sharing sites.

Last April and just a month after the so-called Sinde Law went live, the Spanish Ministry of Culture revealed that the Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual (Copyright Commission) had received dozens of site closure requests from rightsholders. However, according to the Intellectual Property Alliance, little has been done in response.

“To date, only two websites have closed in response to complaints submitted to the IP Commission by IIPA’s member affiliates, and those websites closed voluntarily,” the IIPA wrote in a recent submission to the USTR.

“As of yet the IP Commission has not once made use of its authority to request a judicial writ from the Administrative Court to order the closure of a single infringing website or service. Meanwhile, IIPA is aware of at least 80 complaints that remain outstanding. More than ever, websites providing or linking to illegal content can be secure in the knowledge that takedown measures are nonexistent and result in no consequences,” they add.

Spain also offers other benefits to a site like The Pirate Bay since under current law file-sharing linking sites are not explicitly illegal. Also of interest is an IIPA complaint that Spain’s e-commerce laws do not make it clear that infringement notices are an effective means of providing ISPs with knowledge that infringement is occurring on their services.

Which is just as well, since The Pirate Bay may well attract quite a few of those.

Update: Comment from Swedish Pirate Party Leader Anna Troberg

“It is wonderful to be able to pass on the baton to two sister parties. It is testament to the pirate movement’s maturity and strength. We help each other and work with our sight set firmly on the future. Today, there are more than sixty different Pirate Parties all around the world. Every cut connection to The Pirate Bay will generate two new connections.

“You always have to chose your battles wisely,” Troberg adds. “It would be crazy to enter a game where the rules are decided by the other team. The Pirate Party’s mission is not to produce martyrs for the copyright industry. Our mission is to create longterm political change that ensures that the copyright industry in the future will not be allowed to threaten companies, organisations and individuals into silence with our common judicial system as a weapon.”

Update 2: The party may issue a police complaint.

“The Pirate Party has a board meeting in a few days. I will recommend the board to file a police report against the Rights Alliance for unlawful coercion,” Troberg says. “It is important to determine precisely how forgiving the system is to those who try to abuse the judicial system to silence others.”