Most other sites would have thrown in the towel by now, but despite unprecedented pressure, somehow The Pirate Bay remains alive and in pretty good health today. As one door closes, the site morphs and adapts to find ways to stay open and possibly even stay legal. Is the site becoming more and more difficult to shut down?

In the face of a massive and sustained legal onslaught orchestrated by the combined might of the global music and movie industries, one might have expected The Pirate Bay to fold up and die.

Yet as we sit here on the brink of December 2009, the site remains open. No other site in BitTorrent history has ever weathered so many storms, so many obstacles and so many setbacks, but still prevailed.

When threatened in an aggressive manner, most torrent sites show a little bravado but ultimately comply with the shutdown requests. Not so The Pirate Bay.

The huge raid back in 2006 resulted in the loss of masses of equipment, and this alone would’ve been sufficient to break the will of a lesser site. But within days the site was back online, and since then has hopped around various hosts and countries, evading every attempt to mortally wound it.

Earlier this year the 2006 raid bore its fruit, with the founders of the site being found guilty, given huge fines and ordered to spend time in jail. But even this development didn’t deter the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. With appeals pending, hope remains.

Not even the promised financial penalties could cripple the site or its operators. Could the authorities find any assets belonging to the founders? Not a chance. Even the site had been handed over to new owners, Seychelles-based Reservella.

Threatening the site’s host would also prove useless, as the company is owned by Fredrik Neij. But eventually the authorities took direct action, by threatening the site’s indirect bandwidth supplier with fines if they continued to supply it with a connection to the Internet.

So down the site went yet again. True to form, back it came again within hours with a new ISP. Within 20 minutes that company was threatened by Hollywood. Losing that host, TPB set sail for the east and soon came back online. Again.

However, the site’s enemies were already hatching another plan.

After TPB relocated some of its operations to Ukraine, in October Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN found another chink in the armor. Traffic to the site was routed through The Netherlands via Nforce, a LeaseWeb customer. Nforce quickly complied with BREIN’s threats, and The Pirate Bay went down yet again – very temporarily of course.

Then at the end of October the Stockholm District Court delivered what should’ve been a killer blow, banning Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site on pain of $71,000 in fines for non-compliance. But even this decision is proving toothless.

The Pirate Bay is no longer located in Sweden (and no longer runs a tracker), which causes a problem for the Swedish courts. As for the human flesh and bones included in the decision, they are proving just as elusive.

While both individuals are appealing the decision, both deny running the site anymore, having handed it over to others. Furthermore, Fredrik – aka TiAMO – lives in Thailand and has done for some time. Gottfrid – aka Anakata – can be found sleeping all day and operating his computers all night in the jungles of Cambodia. The locations of the pair clearly present a slight jurisdiction problem for the Swedish decision.

“I am wondering if Swedish law has the power to issue a prohibition or penalty against a website in another country and my adopted acts in another country with a website that does not exist in Sweden,” said Fredrik this week, commenting on the situation.

So, while the site is effectively banned in Sweden, it is not located in Sweden. However, because it no longer operates a tracker of its own it is much less responsible for the infringements of others than it was before. This potentially paves the way for the ban on the site to be lifted.

Furthermore, while the founders are banned from running the site in Sweden, they say they no longer run it. But in any event, neither of them live in Sweden.

In the meantime, the site remains up. Quite what the next move will be by the anti-piracy groups is open to speculation, but historically, one thing seems almost certain – The Pirate Bay will respond and refuse to be cowed.

One day it will disappear, of that there can be little doubt, but it will be at a time and a place of their choosing, not one dictated by their adversaries.