The Pirate Bay, a popular bit torrent website, is claiming they've found a new source of refuge: the "hermit kingdom" North Korea.
Various international litigators have chased The Pirate Bay all around the globe, insisting they cease and desist aiding anonymous internet users seeking cheap access to high-end, pirated content.
From Torrentfreak:
Last week the Swedish Pirate Party was forced to shut down its routing services to The Pirate Bay. The Party and its leaders took this difficult decision after they were threatened with a lawsuit by a local anti-piracy group.
Piratebay and the Swedish Pirate Party are only loosely affiliated — they share political goals — but the Piratebay website does not represent the party, and vice versa.
The Pirate Bay says they've been offered "virtual asylum," but haven't taken it yet. Nonetheless, they say they are using the North Korean network to connect to the rest of the globe.
Others aren't so sure. One user in a thread on Reddit says that The Pirate Bay's traffic is routing through Germany, not North Korea:
That server is in Germany, no way it's possible to have 50ms to NK. Also traditional traceroute has 500ms+ RTT. They are faking/spoofing the ICMP responses. They are also prepending [sic] their route advertisement with corresponding AS paths to further disguise it.
So possibly it's a public relations stunt, or an attempt to deride their legal opponents by implying that North Korea would be more conducive to "internet freedom." Joshua Keating of the website Foreign Policy also isn't so sure The Pirate Bay is where it says it is:
I'm still not totally buying it, given that back in 2007, the site posted an April Fool's joke about moving its hosting to the North Korean embassy. "We would like to thank Kim Jong-Il for the opportunity and we would like all of our users to review their current feelings towards this great nation!" they wrote at the time.
Keating notes that the founders of The Pirate Bay are unlikely to align with North Korea due to their moral philosophy that information should be "free," and Kim Jong Un's regime wholly suppresses the internet.
A couple Pirate Bay "insiders" told Torrent Freak, "this is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high.”
“At the same time, companies from that country are chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information,” they add.
The Pirate Bay insiders said they believe that the offer of asylum from North Korea is a "first step" of possibly the country's changing view of internet freedom.
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