“man where the fine ass penguin bitches at”
Before we had Meta making Second Life VR Chat the Metaverse, we had things like Club Penguin. And Since Club Penguin was run by Disney, and ostensibly made for children, it had a massive list of things you weren’t allowed to say in chat. Of course, the other major thing to note about it being run by Disney is that Disney is highly litigious.
See, Disney closed down the original Club Penguin back in 2017, replacing it with a new version called Club Penguin Island. That said, there was a sizeable contingent that preferred the original a.k.a. Club Penguin Classic versus the new Island variant. Which in turn led to a number of unofficial versions of the game. Which brings us to now.
Just a few days ago, police in the UK busted just such a site. If you were to go to the CPRewritten site (extremely unfortunate naming, there, BTW), you would be greeted with the following message:
This site has been taken over by Operation Creative, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU)
PIPCU Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt gave the following statement to TechCrunch on the matter:
Following a complaint under copyright law, PIPCU have seized a gaming website as part of an ongoing investigation into the site.
Three people were arrested on April 12 on suspicion of distributing materials infringing copyright and searches were carried out.
They have been released under investigation and to aid with the police investigation, they agreed to sign over the website to the control of PIPCU.
This, naturally, has had an effect on the various users of the unofficial site.
Club Penguin Rewritten Admin Thorn posted the following on the game’s Discord:
CPRewritten is shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney.
We have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation.
It’s important to note that this is far from the first of these unofficial Club Penguin sites to get shut down. 2020 saw Disney take down Club Penguin Online, also in the UK, which had… significantly more lax user content restrictions than the original game. The pandemic, coincidentally, likely raised its profile to that point; between the start of the pandemic and its closing, it had gained over 1 million new users.
Club Penguin Rewritten, which seems to have kept its nose a fair bit cleaner, likely benefited from the closures of these other Club Penguin-likes. There’s no word on what the punishment will be for the three (presumably) Admins arrested, but I imagine it’s likely to involve punitive damages.
Source: PC Gamer
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