world intellectual property organization

Earlier this year, the US government admitted that it was funding special programs in conjunction with WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) to help push anti-counterfeiting enforcement efforts around the globe, despite tons of evidence that counterfeiting isn't a big problem, and actually is massively smaller than the industry makes it out to be.

In recent months most domain name issues related to torrent sites or other file-sharing portals usually involved the US Government.

Where many sites lost their domains left and right in three waves of seizures, a major torrent site has now managed to add one to its collection through a WIPO complaint.

In recent months Rapidshare has aggressively targeted search engines and indexers that abused the company's trademark and facilitated copyright infringement.

These actions are part of their campaign to create goodwill with the entertainment industry, but by doing so RapidShare is also shooting itself in the foot.

As a result of the domain seizures the site is no longer the leading file-hoster.

RapidShare has been in the news several times this year.

After filing more than two dozen World Intellectual Property Organization disputes in recent months, Rapidshare has come away with substantial victories.

After pursuing several sites it claim abused its trademarks and offered unfair competition, the file-storage site has now taken control of many of these.

However, not all complaints were successful.

Earlier this year TorrentFreak reported on the contents of a letter sent by former Rapidshare CEO Bobby Chang to the entertainment industry.

Do you remember when Facebook used to be thefacebook.com?

Yeah, me neither. That was all the way back in 2005, before the company purchased the Facebook.com domain for $200,000.