[At-Large] NYTimes : U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown

[Dev Anand Teelucksingh]

NYTimes : U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown
By BEN SISARIO Published: November 26, 2010

"In what appears to be the latest phase of a far-reaching federal
crackdown on online piracy of music and movies, the Web addresses of a
number of sites that facilitate illegal file-sharing were seized this
week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the
Department of Homeland Security.

By Friday morning, visiting the addresses of a handful of sites that
either hosted unauthorized copies of films and music or allowed users
to search for them elsewhere on the Internet produced a notice that
said, in part: “This domain name has been seized by ICE — Homeland
Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a
United States District Court.”

In taking over the sites’ domain names, or Web addresses, the
government effectively redirected any visitors to its own takedown
notice.

“ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered
seizure warrants against a number of domain names,” said Cori W.
Bassett, a spokeswoman for ICE, in a statement. “As this is an ongoing
investigation, there are no additional details available at this
time.”

Read full article :
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/technology/27torrent.html

Also, OSNews.com also reporting on the story says :

"...The US has started seizing the domain names of various websites
through ICANN.......The seizures come from the US Immigrations and
Customs Enforcement, and cover about 70 websites relating to potential
copyright infringement and counterfeit goods, among which is
Torrent-Finder.com, a mere torrent search engine which does not host
or even link to torrents; it displays content hosted elsewhere through
embedded iframes.
"My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice
from any court!” the owner of Torrent-Finder explained TorrentFreak,
“I firstly had DNS downtime.
While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy
had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the
situation and they say it was totally from ICANN."

Read OSNews.com article :
http://www.osnews.com/story/24074/US_Government_Censors_70_Websites


So, how does that work? The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
served the seizure warrant on the gTLD registry and the gTLD registry
then updated the DNS records for that domain name to point to ICE's
DNS servers?

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Dev Anand Teelucksingh