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The chance just got higher that "Game of Thrones" fans with no access to HBO will find torrent and streaming links of Season 6, Episode 5, titled "The Door", on The Pirate Bay hours after the official airing. Facing impending threat of domain seizure, TPB switched back to its original thepiratebay.org domain, a new report said.
The move, according to TorrentFreak, is TPB's answer to the recent ruling issued by a Swedish court that ordered the forfeiture of piratebay.se and thepiratebay.se domains to the state. While the court order still awaits the final word from Swedish Supreme Court prior to implementation, "The Pirate Bay wasted no time and immediately started redirecting the .SE TLD to the good old .ORG just in case," the report said.
In reality, TPB is back to the domain name that the site operators had used when it was first launched in 2003. The team was forced to move away from .ORG as threats of domain suspension and seizure started to emerge. What came next was the use of so-called hydra or multiple domains that allowed the file-sharing site to stay online amidst the aggressive campaign by authorities and rightsholders to shut it down.
And as the same TorrentFreak report noted, this likely will not be the last domain switch for TPB as efforts remain ongoing to bring down the site's operation, which authorities tagged as source of illegal digital downloads and movie or television streaming.
But the good news for TPB and Game of Thrones fans alike is the prospect of continuing to access an alternative channel to enjoy the latest GoT episodes, which is especially true for many viewers outside of the United States and have no HBO. In the past weeks, the GoT show producer has actively went after pirates by issuing takedown requests to torrent operators that saw Game of Thrones download and streaming links disappearing from KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrents.
The Pirate Bay, however, ignored the DMCA requests and insisted that only torrents laced with malwares, spams and child porn will be deleted from the site.
So as KAT and similar sites observed self-censorship in relation to GoT torrents and streaming links, TPB stubbornly opted to keep indexing Game of Thrones Season 6 episodes notwithstanding HBO's takedown requests and threats of domain seizure.
It is expected then that in the same manner that the first four episodes of GoT Season 6 found their way to The Pirate Bay, fans should be able to download or free stream The Door or Episode 5 via the resilient TPB just days or even hours after the May 22 broadcast on HBO.
