July 2024 – Page 53 – news.buyenne.com

After much legal wrangling, in May 2015 the Stockholm District Court ordered the Pirate Bay’s .SE domains to be handed over to the Swedish state.

While the loss of thepiratebay.se and the lesser known piratebay.se had important symbolic value, the Punkt SE registry – which defeated rightsholders’ attempts to hold it liable for Pirate Bay’s infringements – warned that domain seizures would prove ineffective in the fight against piracy.

The Pirate Bay’s response was to spawn a domain name ‘hydra’, with each head of the mythical beast representing a new domain with a lesser known extension. Variants such as thepiratebay.gs, thepiratebay.la, thepiratebay.am, thepiratebay.mn, and thepiratebay.gd, were incorporated into a new TPB logo but very quickly, those domains began to fall too.

Domain Seizures Are Effective When Suspects Can’t Buy More

Deploying multiple domain names, that made no effort to hide affiliation with a specific site, was relatively rare nine years ago. Suspensions and law enforcement seizures weren’t completely unheard of, but were usually reserved for more significant targets such as EliteTorrents, Ninjavideo, and Megaupload.

Nevertheless, scores of seizures have peppered the last two decades, including a notable wave during the last World Cup. However, unlike the examples given above, these lacked a key component in a vital area. All platforms mentioned above were physically shut down and their operators arrested. Many of the sports streaming sites targeted during the World Cup simply shifted to new domains. With no arrests having been made, there was no way of stopping them.

At least in theory, the FBI investigation and Department of Justice action against Z-Library and its alleged operators, should’ve been enough to prevent the site making a comeback.

Yet after seizing at least ten times more domains from Z-Library than the Pirate Bay burned through in a lifetime, the site made its comeback and always seemed to have more.

The Mother of All Hydras

After waving goodbye to at least 140 domains in the initial wave, and then saying Пока, не скучай to many more, Z-Library was subjected to another wave of seizures in May 2023, and another round in November that same year.

The prospect of domain seizures carrying on indefinitely ultimately lay in the hands of Z-Library; the feds can only seize domains for as long as there are domains registered for Z-Library use.

In May 2024, Z-Library announced that it had lost one of its “primary login domains” but that wasn’t the full extent of the damage, and wouldn’t mark the end of the seizures either.

After many Swedish .SE domains were apparently bulk registered, in a consistent format indicating country-specific use, domains including zlibrary-dk.se (Denmark), zlibrary-es.se (Spain), zlibrary-fr.se (France), and dozens more covering most of the planet, the feds bagged themselves another sizeable haul. At the same time, a significant number of .SE domains with a language theme, including japanese-books.se, korean-books.se, latvian-books.se, and bulgarian-books.se, also found themselves under new ownership.

These domains likely had no opportunity to perform their intended function. How they were identified in advance isn’t clear but with zone data freely available, they were always vulnerable to seizure.

More Domains Seized Than Any Other Pirate Site in History

As far as we can determine, the most recent domain seizures are zlib-notifier.info, zlib-notifier.org, go-to-zlibrary.se, singlelogin.se and z-lib.se. For roughly a month, there have been no fresh seizures, but the odds of a resumption seem overwhelmingly high.

What we can say with absolute confidence is whether seizures resume, or whether they don’t, Z-Library’s place in the domain seizure history books, in all its dubious glory, is already chiseled in stone. Scratched underneath, a couple of interesting footnotes.

Having lost around 110 .org domains to seizure, the theory that .org domains may be safer than others, has been completely destroyed. Yet against seemingly insurmountable odds, The Pirate Bay’s .org domain remains completely intact.

While it took a full two years to place The Pirate Bay’s .se domain under the control of the state, Z-Library’s loss of around 96 .se domains appears to have gone remarkable smoothly in Sweden. At the other end of the scale, Z-Library’s avoidance of .com domains, presumably as an anti-seizure tactic, means that in total they lost only six.

Using the tools available, that leads to a grand total of ~350 domains seized from Z-Library since November 2022. It’s possible that additional seizures took place that we know nothing about, but by any standard, that figure is huge in its own right.

That Z-Library is still standing even after all of that, is nothing short of remarkable. The likelihood that two alleged Z-Library operators under house arrest in Argentina, somehow managed to escape and then disappear around May this year, even more so.

Reports that the authorities are working on the assumption that the pair remain in Argentina, provide an interesting counterpoint to the belief that the United States has zero interest in the pair beyond pirating books.

The list of seized domains reads as follows:

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Month: July 2024

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