Finnish group the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) is being threatened with legal action from The Pirate Bay over an anti-piracy campaign, which copies the design of The Pirate Bay website.
CIAPC (who you may remember as being the organization responsible for the PR triumph that was tracking down a nine-year-old girl and confiscating her Winnie the Pooh laptop) appears to have copied The Pirate Bay’s site design to make a point about the availability of legal downloads. In case the fact that the links all flag up legal download sites doesn’t make that obvious, there’s also a picture of a sinking pirate ship in place of the usual Pirate Bay logo.
But by doing so, and by lifting The Pirate Bay’s CSS, the group has violated The Pirate Bay’s usage policy, which states that the site content may not be used by organisations without permission.
“We are outraged by this behaviour. People must understand what is right and wrong,” a Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak. “Stealing material like this on the internet is a threat to economies worldwide.”
While the statement definitely has a tongue-in-cheek element, the group is using CIAPC’s choice of aesthetic to make a serious point.
“We feel that we must make a statement and therefore we will sue them for copyright infringement,” said The Pirate Bay spokesperson. “If not even IFPI [a music lobby group] and their friends can respect copyright, perhaps it’s time to move on?”