International Federation of The Phonographic Industry - The Pirate Bay Incidents

The Pirate Bay Incidents

In mid-October 2007, after the IFPI let the ifpi.com domain registration lapse, ownership of the ifpi.com domain was transferred to The Pirate Bay, a group which claimed it received the domain from an anonymous donor. The group set up a Website under the domain titled "International Federation of Pirates Interests", a replacement backronym for IFPI. Ownership of the domain was returned to the IFPI in late November, when a WIPO arbitration panel concluded that "the Disputed Domain Name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark in which the has rights" and that the Pirate Bay's representative "registered and using the Disputed Domain Name in bad faith" and failed to adequately rebut the IFPI's contention that he "has no rights or a legitimate interest in the Disputed Domain Name." The organisation's website www.ifpi.org was unaffected during the dispute.

In a separate incident, on the 18th February 2009, the Swedish ifpi.se domain was hacked by The Pirate Bay sympathiser(s). This occurred on the third day of the trial of the Pirate Bay founders in Sweden. The site was replaced with a short message directed at the Prosecutor Håkan Roswall and plaintiffs ("Warner Brothers etc"). It was signed "The New Generation". Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay made an appeal on Twitter requesting that the hackers stop this defacement.

On 19 April 2009, after the announcement of an unfavorable Swedish court decision against The Pirate Bay, the ifpi.org and ifpi.se domains were reportedly subjected to a DDoS attack. The newspaper The Register and the BitTorrent community site TorrentFreak speculated that the attacks were perpetrated by Pirate Bay supporters.]]