A Swedish online clothing and tech retailer has assumed ownership of The Pirate Bay's logo and plans to market the iconic pirate ship – with a cassette-tape image and crossbones – on USB sticks.

The company, Sandryds Handel, registered the logo with Sweden's Patent and Registration Office. The Pirate Bay founders, who face a year in prison pending the outcome of their criminal appeal for facilitating copyright infringement, had never registered the mark and have always allowed it to be reproduced.

At least one of the four Pirate Bay founders didn't think the changeover was amusing, saying the image should remain in the public domain. It's worth noting that The Pirate Bay's disdain for private ownership of intellectual property doesn't extend to its domain name, which it agreed to sell for about $8 million, in a deal that now looks all but dead.

Peter Sunde, one of the four convicted Pirate Bay co-founders, told TorrentFreak that that the Bay would challenge the intellectual property office's decision to grant control of the image's rights to Sandryds Handel.

"They took it from the public ... and turned it into their logo that they control," Sunde added on Twitter Monday. "It's a publicly owned logo."

In an interview with Swedish media, Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg explained the company's move.

"The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand," he said. "We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registered."

See Also: