Staff at the notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay are planning to launch their own spin-off site after a falling out with the site's administrator.

The site currently displays a countdown indicating a return on 1 February, however reports from Torrent Freak have suggested that the site will only be returning in a limited format.

Many of the site's former admins and moderators have clashed with those in control of the thepiratebay.se domain over this decision and have revealed their intentions to create their own version of the site from a new domain.

"I wish I had better news to come with," said WTC-SWE, a lead admin of The Pirate Bay. "The launch that is about to take place on February 1 is not us.

"It was until some d***head decided to take TPB crew out of the picture. He thinks a site can be run without any staff at all and at the same time keeping up with fakes, internal issues, etc."

"It's only a matter of time. I will need to blast the whole coding and up all the mess. The real TPB will be back with proper staff and all."

The Pirate Bay was taken down by a police raid in Sweden in December following a complaint by the anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, however many torrent tracking sites have since sprung up in its place, including The Old Pirate Bay.

It is the longest period of time that The Pirate Bay has been offline since an outage in 2006, which followed a similar raid by Swedish police.

The staff of the original site have closed the official IRC channel for The Pirate Bay and are reportedly in possession of a backup version of the site

"Personally I won't accept this neither will any of the crew that's been active for almost 10-11 years," WTC-SWE said. "As an admin and human, I won't stand aside and accept this kind of behaviour. This is the worst scenario that could happen."