[KurtFF8]

Source

The Pirate Bay says it has been offered virtual asylum in North Korea. The move comes after the Norwegian Pirate Party was forced to stop routing traffic for the infamous BitTorrent site by a local copyright group. “We can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the Republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network,” the Pirate Bay says. A traceroute indeed suggests that The Pirate Bay is now being routed through the dictatorial country.

tpb-koreaLast 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.

Luckily for The Pirate Bay, the pirate parties of Norway and Catalunya were willing to take over the role. However, after just a few days the Norwegians had to shut down their Pirate Bay node as well, facing similar threats as their Swedish comrades.

This resulted in some downtime earlier today after which The Pirate Bay returned online from a rather unexpected location.

A Pirate Bay insider informs TorrentFreak that they had been working for a while to get connectivity in North Korea. Today they made the big switch.

“We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country,” a Pirate Bay insider told us. “TPB has been invited just like Eric Schmidt and Dennis Rodman. We’ve declined up until now.”

While The Pirate Bay may not visit North Korea, they announce that they are using the country’s network to connect the BitTorrent site to the rest of the world.

“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 says that it sees the current step as one forward for North Korea, and the BitTorrent site hopes that all North Koreans can soon access the site to foster freedom of information.

“We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country’s changing view of access to information. It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond.”

“We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand,” TPB concludes.

It’s worth noting that the Korean connection is used to hide Pirate Bay’s true location. The cloud servers behind it are still believed to be hosted elsewhere in the world.

While it’s hard to believe everything The Pirate Bay says, the site does indeed route through a North Korean netblock at the moment. Wheter it is sanctioned by the authorities, or if there is perhaps some hacking and hijacking trickery involved is unclear.

However, for some reason we think that Hollywood and the major music labels will have a hard time shutting that node down.

tpb-trace

The most interesting thing here to me isn't just that TPB has decided to use access in the DPRK, but rather that they want to use it to make a political message about the DPRK's censorship. I would imagine this won't be received as they think, but you never know.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

I would be surprised if these news were true.

This

“We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country’s changing view of access to information. It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond.”

is surely irony.

[Rainbow Crow]

This isn't about sending a political message, it's about finding a place that won't shut them down. Internet "pirates" are a ridiculous bunch.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

The pirate bay is all about "freedom of information" and therefore justifies its very existence with a political argument. But regardless, what does North Korea of all countries gain from this apart from ridicule and being pointed at for hypocrisy?

After going to the TPB website and reading the comment section of the relevant blog entry, it looks like they have made a similar joke before.

I've also found this. Can't vouch for the accuracy of the argument, but it wouldn't surprise me if these guys are able to make it superficially look like they are hosted in North Korea.

Finally, they are also known for their somewhat twisted humour and are certainly not naive ("We believe North Korea is opening up!" ), so the paragraph I quoted must be a joke.

[Rainbow Crow]

The pirate bay is all about "freedom of information" and therefore justifies its very existence with a political argument.

So merely having a "political argument" is all it takes to justify existence? It's ok to steal because they have a "political argument" ?

Their only argument is "I want for free what other people worked to make or get, because it should be free, because I want it." Wikileaks has a political argument, these guys are just thieves.

Maybe Kim will get bored of them and they can try moving to Somalia next.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

I'm not defending TPB, but I'm trying to explain why it is very unlikely that they got offered or have accepted an alleged offer of "virtual asylum" by North Korea.

[mikema63]

This was fake, a joke.

[KurtFF8]

Indeed, TPB posted a long thing thanking people for criticizing them during the joke.