Whoops – Pirate Bay's hydra approach has officially failed as the infamous online piracy website has had to return to its original domain due to legal threats in multiple challenges. On 12 May, the Swedish Court of Appeal ruled that the two Pirate Bay domains registered to the website in Sweden, namely ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se, would be confiscated by the state for assisting in copyright infringement.

The original decision by the District Court ruled that Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (who has been out of prison since June 2015) was the owner of the two domains, but he has denied this and is filing an appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court, according to Torrent Freak.

And as there is only a slim chance that the Supreme Court will find in his favour, Pirate Bay has returned to using original ThePirateBay.org domain that it first started with way back in 2003.

The Pirate Bay was founded in 2003 an online index of digital content of mostly entertainment media, and none of its original co-founders are running the site any more as most of them are in jail or have been to jail for copyright infringement offences.

The community that now runs the website is used to having to come up with new solutions to keep it alive and escape detection from law enforcement, so after Swedish police started its witch hunt against the website in 2014 and it was likely that the .se domains would one day be seized, the Pirate Bay team decided to try a new approach.

In May 2015, Pirate Bay announced that the .se domains would automatically redirect to one of six new domain names registered across the world – piratebay.gs, piratebay.la, piratebay.vg, piratebay.am, piratebay.mn and piratebay.gd – in order to make sure that the website was always accessible to the public somewhere in the world.

All the heads of the hydra have been chopped off

However, copyright holders have been busy too. Shortly after the hydra approach was announced, the domain registrar in South Georgia suspended the .gs domain, and then in July the .am domain, held by the domain registrar in Armenia, was seized too.

Then there was a brief respite and the rest of the domains were still available, but on 28 December 2015 the remaining domain names piratebay.la, piratebay.mn, piratebay.gd and piratebay.vg, which were registered to Idotz.net, a US-based registrar, were all shut down, together with an additional four other domains – piratebay.fm, piratebay.sh, piratebay.mu and piratebay.tw. The WHOis information for all the domains states that Neij is indeed the domain owner.

In early 2016, Pirate Bay switched back to the .se domains, but now that Swedish authorities have finally seized it, they're back to the .org domain name, which is already blocked by many internet service providers (ISP) all over the world.

Of course, people who are religious about illegal downloading will always find a way, and a large number of Pirate Bay proxy portals are still easy to find online, plus there are now lots of competitors keen to keep online piracy alive, like Kickass Torrents, Torrentz, ExtraTorrent and YTS.

Given Pirate Bay's track record, it is likely that the team running it will likely come up with another solution to keep the site thriving, and as research released by the European Commission in 2015 shows, raiding and shutting down pirate websites is ultimately completely ineffective.