Irony alert: Pirate Bay accuses anti-piracy group of illegal copying

[silicon_toad2000]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/pirate_bay_sues_ciapc/

The Pirate Bay has claimed it will sue Finland's main anti-piracy pressure group, theCopyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre(CIAPC), after the group illegally copied code from their Swedish neighbors.

"We are outraged by this behavior," a spokesman told TorrentFreak in what must surely be the spirit of irony. "People must understand what is right and wrong. Stealing material like this on the internet is a threat to economies worldwide."

"We feel that we must make a statement and therefore we will sue them for copyright infringement," they said.

CIAPC's crime was to use the infamous pirate ship image that is so hated in the Big Content industry on the front page of its website.

The copyright cops twisted the image to show the boat sinking, which no doubt passes for Wildian humor in such circles, and which should legally be fair use. But CIAPC forgot to do its homework in this case, it seems.

According to screenshots provided by The Pirate Bay, CIAPC cut and pasted the CSS style sheet from the media indexing site to obtain the image. Under the website's terms and conditions that's fine, so long as permission is sought first – but CIAPC didn't bother, it seems, so a penalty clause kicks in.
CIAPC

"We reserve the rights to charge for usage of the site in case this policy is violated," The Pirate Bay's policy reads. "The charge will consist of a basic fee of EUR 5,000 plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation."

There's also the question of how CIAPC got the code in the first place. The group has spent the last few years publicly pillorying pirates and successfully forcing Finnish ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, so it's a little embarrassing to be caught out not eating its own dog food.