In 2024, award-winning singer songwriter Taylor Swift became the victim of a wave of pornographic deepfakes flooding social media feeds. The controversy set the stage for a pandemic of nonconsensual AI-generated nudes, forcing big tech companies into damage control mode and even striking up a political brawl during the runup to the 2024 presidential elections.
Even at the time, Swift’s lawyers were no strangers to their client being the subject of harassment. Almost a decade previously, Swift bought the web addresses TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult right before they went public in 2015, ensuring that nobody could use the domains for any abusive purposes.
At the time, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international regulatory body and nonprofit that presides over the internet’s databases and generic top-level domains (TLD), like .com, had recently broadened the available list, prompting public figures to jump into action.
Now, according to an October 7 ICANN application, Taylor Swift’s TAS Rights Management company, a Tennessee-based IP holding and management company established to protect Swift’s copyrights, brand assets, and trademarks, has applied for the rights to yet another top-level domain: .taylorswift.
