The Pirate Bay Is Back Online (Sort Of)

The Pirate Bay lives! Sort of. Rival site IsoHunt has cloned the torrenting service and re-launched it at oldpiratebay.org.search.

IsoHunt said it copied The Pirate Bay's search engine and link database before it was taken offline after a recent police raid in Sweden.

"We, the IsoHunt.to team, copied the base of The Pirate Bay in order to save it to the generations of users," a blog post said. "Nothing will be forgotten. Keep on believing, keep on sharing!"

The mirror site, which was launched in an effort to keep torrents accessible, not to cause confusion, is missing many original Pirate Bay torrents, according to TorrentFreak.

"We saw a lot of topics where people are looking for something like this," IsoHunt told the news blog. "For sure it has some bugs and glitches but we are going to improve it. The tool is for the users' convenience till TPB comes alive again."

VentureBeat, meanwhile, called the new service "much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay," adding that popular searches unsurprisingly reveal content overlaps between isoHunt.to and oldpiratebay.org.

The original incarnation of the popular torrenting site was wiped by police during a raid in Stockholm last Tuesday. Law enforcement seized servers, computers, and other equipment in an operation intended to protect intellectual property.

At the same time, The Pirate Bay and a number of other similar sites disappeared from the Web.

The torrent community was quick to respond: TorrentFreak reported on a number of copycat sites, including thepiratebay.cr, which directs users to a different website that charges for access.

Police and copyright holders will be disappointed to find out, though, that little changed in the days after The Pirate Bay's shutdown. As reported by Variety, the number of IP addresses torrenting took a swift dive of about 6 million, but returned back to the 100-million-plus line within two days.

Not everyone was upset that The Pirate Bay went dark: Co-founder Peter Sunde said that "I've not been a fan of what TPB has become."

Google, meanwhile, recently removed several popular third-party Pirate Bay apps from its Play store for copyright violations. The banned applications included The Pirate Bay Proxy, The Pirate Bay Premium, The Pirate Bay Mirror, and PirateApp—all of which use proxy sites to help users get around ISP blockades and access TBP from a mobile device.