You know about Digital File Check? “WHAT?” Well, it’s a computer application initiated by the IFPI, who ‘represents the recording industry worldwide’. It prevents people, especially children, to ‘illegaly’ download music. (click on the photo twice to enlarge)

Alright, back to 2010, the year Incubate’s theme was Piracy. We had dozens of small ideas for it and worked out a few of them. One was a pirated version of the very ugly website DigitalFileCheck.nl (hihi) which was hosted on DigitalFileCheck.com (strange that one was never claimed by IFPI). So what should you do on a pirated domain? Yep, we transformed the text to helpful information about how to download torrents. As we all know, people who download music are more willing to pay for physical releases in the record stores. So there actually was no problem at all for IFPI.

Fast forward. We never really did anything with the site and forgot about it, until the IFPI e-mailed us in December they’d start a case at the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO to get the domainname digitalfilecheck.com back. That’s where it went wrong. If those IFPI people got in touch with us directly, they’d get their hands on the domainname within a few hours.

Anyhow, they didn’t do that. It took them 46 days to finally receive the domainname DigitalFileCheck.com, and cost IFPI (or the record companies supporting them) about 1,000 euros to get one silly internet domain. The money you pay when buying a cd, used for such useless

Oh, and DigitalFilecheck.nl? That website doesn’t excist anymore.