The Pirate Bay may not be the world’s largest BitTorrent site, but it’s definitely the best known. So much so that even people who never visited the site itself are familiar with its logo. But, in keeping with their anti-IP stance, the logo wasn’t copyrighted or trademark by the owners, something that a Swedish online retailer saw as an opportunity to make some cash, so it officially registered a slightly altered logo with the PRV, Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office, stirring quite an uproar.
The issue has been resolved fairly quickly, with Sandryds backing down on the claims that the company already pretty much admitted were bogus. A while back, after noticing that the logo had no copyright protection whatsoever, something that the Pirate Bay actually takes pride in, Sandryds decided to register the logo for itself. It submitted its own version to the PRV in a slightly modified color and with the words Pirate Bay written as “Pirate bay.” Seeing that the logo hadn’t been registered by anyone else, the PRV actually awarded the company the trademark.
“The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand,” a company spokesman told a Swedish news outlet. “We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registere… (read more)