Summary
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Paint.net developer Rick Brewster finally gets the Paint.net domain after 22 years of fighting.
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The original owner’s malicious redesign of the website triggered copyright and anti-squatting actions, earning Brewster the domain.
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The new Paint.net site will replace GetPaint.net; Old links will be redirected during the migration.
When I was using Windows, Paint.net was my go-to application when I needed an image editor that was more powerful than Paint, but didn’t need all the bells and whistles that GIMP or Photoshop had. Despite this, it always bothered me that you couldn’t download Paint.net from the ‘Paint.net’ website. Instead, you had to go to the GetPaint.net website, which was always strange.
For the past 22 years, the owners of the ‘Paint.net’ domain refused to hand it over to the app developer; At least, unless they paid a huge fee. However, the people behind the Paint.net domain made a critical mistake, allowing the Paint.net app developer to finally secure the URL they had been fighting for for years.
Paint.net Author Finally Secures ‘Paint.net’ URL
It took more than two decades of struggle
How he saw it neowinthe man behind the app, Rick Brewster, published in X about your new acquisition. After 22 years of competing for it, it finally managed to wrest the Paint.net URL from the hands of its previous owners. As such, you will soon be able to download Paint.net from ‘Paint.net’ and the old GetPaint.net will point to the new one.
So how did Brewster do it? Well, as he explains in the answers, the original owners of the website either didn’t want to sell it to him or asked for “a lot, a lot, a lot of money.” After 22 years, in December 2025, the owners made a fatal mistake: they redesigned the Paint.net website to look like the actual download page of the application, thus making money from Brewster’s work with incorrect links and ads.
Brewster struck down the law against the owners, claiming that their actions constituted copyright infringement and domain squatting by profiting from someone else’s work. Brewster managed to win and, with the help of a lawyer, obtained the Paint.net domain.
In fact, you can see Brewster’s work on the New Paint.net website. As of this writing, it’s still moving everything around, so there’s not much to see yet. However, once you’re done, Paint.net will act as the main site and GetPaint.net will become a redirect because, as Brewster says, “there are 22 years of links that still need to work.”
