Paint.NET can finally be downloaded from the "right" place

After years of failed negotiations, a controversial website redesign helped Paint.NET's creator finally claim the coveted domain.

Paint.NET is a particularly useful and powerful image editor, available for free on Windows. It was initially released in 2004 by university student Rick Brewster as a replacement for Paint on Windows, and it has evolved quite significantly in the past couple of decades. We cover its releases regularly here on Neowin Software. However, a notable flaw in Paint.NET was that it wasn't actually accessible from www.paint.net, but that is changing soon.

Up until now, the official place to download Paint.NET was from the www.getpaint.net website, because Brewster did not own the domain for his titular utility. However, after spending over 22 years trying to get procure the domain, Brewster is now the owner of the www.paint.net domain, finally.

As explained in a detailed post on X, Brewster had been trying to secure the domain for quite a while, but the previous owners had either declined to sell or were demanding a very high price for transfer of ownership. However, the latest owner made a mistake in December 2025, when they revamped the website to make it seem like it was the official portal for the Windows utility, deceiving existing and potential customers.

This meant that the situation turned into a classic case of copyright infringement and domain squatting as the owner was profiting off of the Paint.NET trademark. Brewster quickly got a lawyer involved, and long story short, Brewster finally got the domain that he had been vying for, for the past 22 years.

Right now, if you navigate to the website, you'll see a message asking you to download Paint.NET from getpaint.net, along with links to Brewster's post on X and BlueSky. However, this is only temporary as the developer is soon kicking off the migration process for the new website. It's unclear what will happen to the existing website, but it will likely redirect to the new one. Brewster hasn't detailed a migration timeline yet, but it should happen sooner rather than later.

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 10:55 am AEST (my time).

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