Tag Archives: .MN

Swedish Court Orders Seizure of Pirate Bay .SE Domains

A Swedish court has ordered .SE domain names used by The Pirate Bay be seized, but the prominent file sharing site has moved on thwarting the move already using other ccTLDs for their domains to keep the site going.The Stockholm District Court ordered the seizure on Thursday reported TorrentFreak. But in another report, TorrentFreak noted The Pirate Bay has already moved on being now available using the .gs, .la, .vg, .am, .mn and .gd domain names.”In 2013, Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, the man behind the operation that took the site down in December, filed a motion targeting ThePirateBay.se (the site’s main domain) and PirateBay.se (a lesser used alternative)”, reported TorrentFreak.The prosecutor alleged The Pirate Bay is an illegal operation with its domains “tools used by the site to infringe copyright. Noting that Punkt SE supplies and controls the domains and is therefore liable for their (mis)use, the domains should be dealt with in the same way that other criminal tools would be, Ingblad argued.”But the court did not uphold the prosecutor’s claim against .SE. The registry notes though the two domain names will be forfeited from their domain owner and be transferred to the ownership of the Swedish state.”We are pleased that the city court ruled in our favour and agreed with our argument that, in our role as the top-level domain administrator, it is not our responsibility to decide on what is or is not unlawful in specific cases” says Elisabeth Ekstrand, Senior Legal Counsel at .SE.”In its ruling to the domain owner in this case, the city court decided that the right to these two domain names was to be forfeited,” .SE said in a statement. “The domain names are also to be transferred to the state, something that has never previously been tried.””.SE will follow the judicial decision once it gains legal force, and over the next few weeks we will determine the actions to be taken in practical terms,” says Elisabeth Ekstrand.However, .SE also stated in their statement they believe “the forfeiture of a domain name is an ineffective method for combating online criminal activities. It is very easy to transfer one site to another top-level domain. And even if the domain were to be closed, the content would still be available via the Internet using both the IP number and via search engines.”