UK cops seize unofficial Club Penguin site and arrest three people

pcgamer.com:

Club Penguin Rewritten is one of many unofficial continuations of the officially defunct but much-loved Club Penguin. Well, it was. Visit the CPRewritten site today and you'll be greeted by a black page with the City of London Police logo, on which is written: «This site has been taken over by Operation Creative, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU).»

PIPCU Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt subsequently emailed a statement to Techcrunch, which reads:

«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.»

First of all, doesn't PIPCU sound like what they'd call a penguin Pokémon?

Second of all: erk. The afterlife of Club Penguin really deserves its own article, but in short the original game was built by New Horizon Interactive and launched in 2005 to immediate success—attracting a young audience of such size that, in 2007, both developer and game were acquired by Disney for just over $350 million. The game would run for another decade before a successor, Club Penguin Island, was released and the original game closed in March 2017.

That, of course, was not the end of Club Penguin. While many migrated to the new game, plenty of others had serious problems with how the experience had changed. And this comes down to Club Penguin's odd nature as an experience: it is a videogame, sure, but for those of a particular generation it was also the major online social