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The Pirate Bay Takes Over Anti-Piracy Domain

Posted by kdawson on from the heads-will-roll dept.

palpatin writes to let us know that The Pirate Bay has now taken up residence at IFPI.com, a domain once owned by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The Pirate Bay says the site will now promote the International Federation of Pirates Interests. IFPI can still be reached at ifpi.org. Torrentfreak has up a brief interview with Brokep, one of the administrators of The Pirate Bay, who says: "It's not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it's ours and we're keeping it."

4 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Legality? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Informative

    If I got it right, they founded the "International Federation of Pirate Interests" or something like that, which has (a happy coincidence, no doubt) the letters IFPI as its acronym.

    You can have a trademark all you want, if someone has at least the same "reason" to have a domain, you have no case. Ferrero lost a case for the domain "kinder.at" (with "kinder" being their trade mark, before German legislation made trademarking common words illegal ("kinder" means "children" in German)) against (IIRC) some youth organisation. The court's decision was explained with the fact that there is no danger that the domain holder (the youth organisation) could be mistaken for Ferrero (a company making chocolate products).

    Now, if the IFPI wants to claim that they could be mistaken for a bunch of 'pirates', this could be different...

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Re:Legality? by MoonFog · · Score: 5, Informative

    Interestingly enough, this comes as a porn site was forced to give up acdc.com and give it back to the band. Here's an article

  3. It looks like it expired, not stolen by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Informative
    According to the whois:

    Creation date: 28 Jan 2007 19:02:24
    Expiration date: 28 Jan 2008 19:02:24
    This looks more like the phonographers let the domain expire at the beginning of the year and someone else registered it on January 28th. This happens all the time, especially by spammers and registrars that turn it into a "search page" for a while.
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  4. Re:Legality? by Crayon+Kid · · Score: 5, Informative

    He wasn't without the domain for very long, but just goes to show you that things like this are hard to make bulletproof.


    "Not long"? It took Kremen 5 years to get the domain back and 10 to finally see Cohen in a US prison (for other reasons, granted) where he could no longer escape his dues.
    --
    i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer