Club Penguin Online, one of the largest Club Penguin fan servers, shut down Friday after The Walt Disney Company issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice earlier this week. According to BBC, a London man involved with the server was arrested on suspicion of child pornography.
Club Penguin Online, an unlicensed revival of the popular Disney-owned children’s social network, is one of the largest fan replicas of the game, accruing over 8 million users over the last two years. In a now-removed blog from this week, Club Penguin Online wrote that the game would no longer be running “after May 2020” as the result of a copyright claim. The notice, which is available in full through the nonprofit Lumen Database, says the site “is an unauthorized version of the Club Penguin game and contains infringing copyrighted content.”
Club Penguin appears to have complied with the order; as of publication, the website is no longer available.
A BBC investigation found that the Club Penguin Online game was not being moderated by staff, and it was littered with racist and anti-semitic content. A London man associate with the website was arrested for suspicion of possessing child abuse images by Metropolitan Police, according to BBC. That man was released on bail. It’s unclear if the child pornography arrest was related to the project’s broader moderation issues.
