DHS Seized Domains Based On Bad Evidence 235
An anonymous reader writes "Back over Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) made a lot of news by seizing over 80 domain names. While many of these involved sites that sold counterfeit products, five of the domains involved copyright issues. Four of them involved hiphop-related blogs — including ones that hiphop stars like Kanye West and others used to promote their own works, and the last one was a meta search engine that simply aggregated other search engines. Weeks went by without the owners of those sites even being told why their domains were seized, but the affidavit for the seizure of those five sites has recently come out, and it's full of all sorts of problems. Not only was it put together by a recent college graduate, who claimed that merely linking to news and blog posts about file sharing constituted evidence of copyright infringement, it listed as evidence of infringement songs that labels specifically sent these blogs to promote. Also, what becomes clear is that the MPAA was instrumental in 'guiding' ICE's rookie agent in going after these sites, as that appeared to be the only outside expertise relied on in determining if these sites should be seized."
I hope FOX digs in here (Score:5, Interesting)
I really hope the Republicans make a civil rights issue out of this. Using Homeland security for copyright enforcement? Forget about the fact that they were incompetent, even if they had gotten this right it was way way out of line.
Re:Larger Scale Than One Agent (Score:2, Interesting)
How the hell can US justify $800k damages to the internationally extradited head of a DVD piracy ring, and $1.5M to someone for downloading a few MP3s?
Re:Larger Scale Than One Agent (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, lets see, from the affidavit...
RapGodFathers.com and RMX4U.com both had forum sections labeled "Bootlegs" and "Appz" with admin written descriptions stating they were for the posting of links to illegally shared content. So they were encouraging copy right violations.
Torrent-Finder.com appears to be entirely clear of any wrong doing based on what is in the affidavit. Every piece of "evidence" came from some other website and Torrent-Finder presented it as news without any editorial comment being noted.
Dajaz1.com and Onsmash.com are both run by idiots apparently. They (and the artists that leaked to them) forgot that when the RIAA handed those huge ass checks to the rappers the RIAA got the copyrights. Doesn't matter that Kayne West told them they could leak his stuff... he doesn't own the distribution rights to it any more.
I doubt DHS and ICE are going to get their asses handed to them for busting 2 sites that skirted the rules so closely they fell over the edge, and 2 sites that found out the hard way that artists who sign with RIAA members don't own their distribution rights anymore.
The Torrent-Finder.com situation seems to be the only one that has no basis.