Swede Peter Sunde continues his “unequal battle” against the world system of copyright protection. The founder of the famous BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay has already served a sentence in a Swedish prison and paid a considerable fine for assisting mass copyright violations; however, he hasn’t given up his believes. His new project is a company called Njalla, which is based in a Caribbean state of Saint Kitts & Nevis.
Basically Njalla is a proxy service to register domain names. From the point of view of the domain business, the company is working as a reseller of a large domain registrar Tucows and allows its clients to register domain names in the majority of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and some country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) for a rather standard fee (for example, annual fee for .COM domain at Njalla is offered for about US$16). After name registration at Njalla it will formally still “belong” to the company, which only lets the registrant a right to use it. However, to register a name clients only have to give their email addresses. Therefore, Njalla provides wide opportunities for creation of web resources linked to illegal activities. In case this activity is discovered, the company even willingly won’t be able to disclose registrant’s personal data. In this sense the Njalla’s slogan that “it offers a higher level of privacy protection than you get anywhere else” should be recognized is fair.
Obviously, there are certain rules for the use of domain names at Njalla; however, they are quite broad and vague. Peter Sunde himself clarifies: “As long as you don’t hurt anyone else, we’ll let you do your thing”. As it is easy to guess, distribution of copyright protected materials he doesn’t consider to be harmful to anyone. “You do hurt someone by putting child porn or revenge porn”, says Sunde. “You don’t hurt people by putting a movie online.”
It’s hard to assess the prospects of the new creation of Peter Sunde. Domain Incite points out that ICANN is currently working on a document, according to which domain registrars would be able to cooperate only with proxy servers accredited by the corporation. It’s highly unlikely that Njalla will be one of them.
