Daily Domain Name Registration Blog

Alas, I spoke too soon in yesterday’s post about The Pirate Bay’s jovial use of a domain name originally belonging to the IFPI (the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

I had hoped that the IFPI wouldn’t pick too much on The Pirate Bay in trying to get its domain back, but it seems a complaint’s already been filed to the World Intellectual Property Organisation. A spokesperson from the IFPI claims that members of The Pirate Bay are cybersquatting on IFPI.com, and that it is being used in bad faith. This is despite the fact that the IFPI hasn’t had use of the domain since March 2007, when they apparently forgot to renew it, and it got grabbed by someone clearly sympathetic to The Pirate Bay’s cause.

Amusingly, a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay has said, ingenuously, that they’re not doing anything illegal or even immoral; they also have an organisation with the initials IFPI (the International Federation of Pirates Interests), and they wish to use the domain simply for the purposes of promoting that organisation. They claimed that they did not intend to mislead people looking for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and indeed there is a polite redirection on the pirates’ site for those who have ended up there in error.
I would be delighted if The Pirate Bay got to keep this domain. Perhaps it’s just the part of me that wants to root for the underdog; mostly, I just think it’s funny.

Speaking of piracy, I noticed on Slashdot the other day that Universal is trying to convince Apple that they owe it some sort of piracy tax, since its products are just “repositories for stolen music”. This is silly on two counts, in my opinion. Firstly, people illegally download music whether or not they have mp3 players. Secondly, Apple is doing more than most in providing a way of legitimately downloading music via its iTunes store. As one commenter on the article notes, if you start charging people a penalty who have only legal mp3s on their iPod, they might be so cross that they start taking it as a blanket licence to download anything they like from anywhere for free… Radiohead’s pioneering decision to release In Rainbows as a “pay as much as you want” download is surely a far more effective (and certainly a more innovative) way of dealing with piracy than is imposing unnecessary taxes. If there’s one thing that’s been made very clear in recent years, it’s that people hate being made to pay for the crimes of others when it comes to piracy.

Resources:

Domainmonster.com on the IFPI’s attempt to win back its domain name.

The International Federation for Pirate Interests.