A Finnish anti-piracy group has copied the design of The Pirate Bay website for their latest anti-piracy campaign. The Pirate Bay is outraged by this move and says it will sue the group for breaking their site policy, which clearly states that organizations are not permitted to steal the site design for nefarious purposes. "People must understand what is right and wrong," The Pirate Bay says.

Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC, known worldwide for tracking down a 9 year-old “pirate girl” and having her Winnie The Pooh laptop confiscated, launched a controversial campaign yesterday.

The group copied The Pirate Bay’s design for their campaign site, including the CSS stylesheet, and replaced the logo with one of a sinking ship.

Of course the site doesn’t host any torrents. Instead, all links point to a page which informs visitors that there are plenty of legal alternatives to The Pirate Bay.

Anti-Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay, generally quite supportive of copy-pasting, is not happy with CIAPC’s apparent infringement and plans to take legal steps against the anti-piracy group.

“We are outraged by this behavior. People must understand what is right and wrong. Stealing material like this on the internet is a threat to economies worldwide,” a Pirate Bay spokesman told TorrentFreak.

“We feel that we must make a statement and therefore we will sue them for copyright infringement,” the spokesman adds.

“If not even IFPI and their friends can respect copyright, perhaps it’s time to move on?”

CIAPC takes part in the anti-piracy program of the music lobby group IFPI, who coincidentally sued the Pirate Bay admins in Finland two years ago.

Pirated Pirate Bay CSS

The screenshot above shows that CIAPC effectively copied The Pirate Bay CSS stylesheet. This is a violation of The Pirate Bay’s usage policy, which specifically prohibits the use of any site material without permission.

“Our site (and all of its contents) is free of charge for anyone for personal usage. Organizations (for instance, but not limited to, non-profit or companies) may use the system if they clear this with the system operators first,” the policy reads.

“We reserve the rights to charge for usage of the site in case this policy is violated. The charge will consist of a basic fee of EUR 5,000 plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation,” it adds.

It is doubtful that CIAPC will voluntarily pay the fee, so The Pirate Bay believes it has no other option than to take the group to court and demand compensation. After all, they have to protect their copyrights.

How serious this threat is has yet to be seen.

With regard to CIAPC, it’s worth noting that they managed to copy the Pirate Bay website despite the fact that most Finnish ISPs have been ordered to block the website.