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

[Carlton Samuels]

Seems like they did it following prescribed procedure.  Good thing is any
person aggrieved can always seek relief in district court.


==============================
Carlton A Samuels
Mobile: 876-818-1799
Strategy, Planning, Governance, Assessment & Turnaround
=============================


On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Dev Anand Teelucksingh
<admin at ttcsweb.org>wrote:

> 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?
>
> -----
>
> Dev Anand Teelucksingh
>
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