US Grabs More Domain Names, $1.4M From Online Counterfeit Operations 69
coondoggie writes "According to court documents, investigation by federal law enforcement agents revealed that subjects whose domain names had been seized in a November 2010 operation continued to sell counterfeit goods using new domain names. In particular, the individuals, based in China, sold counterfeit professional and collegiate sports apparel, primarily counterfeit sports jerseys." So now the government has again taken over a swathe of domain names used in crime.
Yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
Is anyone else underwhelmed by this "accomplishment"? Sports jerseys? Really? I guess as long as the proceeds more than fund the operations I am OK with this, but it had better be a net win for the government.
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But now that we have achieved world peace, cured all diseases, and there is no hunger, we have nothing else to do but go after t-shirt and shoe companies.
GO TEAM!
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Maybe we're just looking at the new cold war.
I'd say China's gonna take this one.
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If someone stole your bicycle or broke into your car and stole your stereo, you wouldn't report it to the police because their time and money is better spent going after murderers and rapists, rather than petty crime such as yours? Is that your logic?
I used to work next door to a small 3-woman firm that licenses Warner Brothers (mostly Batman and Looney Tunes) characters and puts them on car floormats and sells them to auto supply shops. Theirs is "officially licensed product". They pay 10 to 20 grand for a
it's just a bit of moldy old paper (Score:1)
The constatution does not EXPRESSLY make couterfetting a crime, nor does it EXPRESSLY allow the siezure of domain name's without due process.
This is therefor by definition an illegal tax on competition.
(roman_mir, can't login for some reason)
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The constatution does not EXPRESSLY make couterfetting a crime, nor does it EXPRESSLY allow the siezure of domain name's without due process.
This is therefor by definition an illegal tax on competition.
(roman_mir, can't login for some reason)
Your argument would have greater weight if you could spell "Constitution" and "counterfeiting" and "therefore" and "seizure". Also, if you understood the proper use of apostrophes. I'm not usually such a spelling and grammar nazi, but, dude, this is just painful to look at.
That's just capitalism working. (Score:2)
Much as I feel sympathy for your cute girls, if they are not making money from this it's probably because they are/were paying too much for the licence fee. They made a bad business decision somewhere down the line and flunked out. I have no personal knowledge of the market for Loony Tunes car floormats but would suspect it's not huge anyway.
If their themed mats are markedly more expensive than an ordinary mats then people just will not buy them. To blame pirated mats for this is just trying to find reaso
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If someone stole your bicycle or broke into your car and stole your stereo, you wouldn't report it to the police because their time and money is better spent going after murderers and rapists, rather than petty crime such as yours? Is that your logic?
If you want to compare using Federal agents to go after infringement of some copyright to my bike being stolen and asking my local police to look into it, we have nothing to discuss, as you are an idiot.
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And as a result of the squeeze, fake sports jerseys will now cost up to $0.50 more to make up for it.
I wonder how much the enforcement action is costing us?
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The Government is not there to make money.
So if we ever want Government to function correctly we as a people must debate what we want the Government to accomplish for society with the understanding that we as a people are willing to pay for it. If we're not willing to pay for it then the Government shouldn't be doing it. What percentage of your income are you willing to pay for roads, school lunches, the military, the elderly? How
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"The Government is not there to make money"
No, it's there to spend money.
And contrary to press reports, neither of the two parties in the US seem at all serious about spending less, just differ on where to spend more.
And they both know the magic words to apply to get any bill through:
a) terrorism
b) child porn
We need a new DNS fast (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We need a new DNS fast (Score:4, Insightful)
It works in both directions and isn't a 'usa thing', just wait until the UN gets bored and starts doing this to everyone they can find..
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Re:We need a new DNS fast (Score:4, Insightful)
About the only way to do this would be to create a system that is truly out of everyone's control. Otherwise, you can guarantee that someone's idea of "you can't do that!" will be imposed on the system. If it's not in the name of "IP," it'll be in the name of fighting racism and bigotry. Or terrorism. Or child pornography. Or something else.
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Exactly. It's outside the purview of the domain name system to police content.
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About the only way to do this would be to create a system that is truly out of everyone's control.
Skynet?
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More along the lines of peer-to-peer networks, Bitcoin, or Tor.
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Put enough of them together, and literally nothing ever gets done. Basically, just put an independent committee run by a music company, a tech company, and a retailer in charge, and they'll never agree on anything.
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That, i will agree with.
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UN can't do shit, it doesn't have any enforcement agencies. It can only do what the constituting member states can do, each to their own population.
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Burying these evil counterfeiters in UN resolutions will stop them!
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an internet where the rootservers are in international waters.
Mmmmh... An Internet ruled by somalian pirates :-)
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Ok, the country with by far the most internet users is China [internetworldstats.com], you want to give them a 22.5% interest in regulating the internet? Or instead, lets prioritize on a per capita basis, the country with the highest internet usage per capita is Greenland [nationmaster.com]. They're the most vulnerable to regulation, so let's put them in charge. India has only 10% per capita online, but they're #3 for most users. The top G8 country per capita is Canada at #4.
You figure out a way to get big countries with low per capita usage and
whack-a-mole (Score:5, Funny)
Ah. Whack-a-mole. That most American of games. Such an excellent way to spend someone else's money.
Not Right (Score:2)
I don't believe that this is right of the American government to do. The Internet is not sole U.S. property and there are no court proceedings to justify it.
Re:Not Right (Score:4, Informative)
I don't believe that this is right of the American government to do. The Internet is not sole U.S. property and there are no court proceedings to justify it.
Then don't put it on a TLD that is within U.S. jurisdiction. You'll notice that thepiratebay.org now redirects to thepiratebay.se for this reason.
And if the U.S. asks a country to take down a ccTLD/server/whatever and the country complies, who should you be bitching at? The U.S. or your own government that is complying with another country's demands?
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The U.S. or your own government that is complying with another country's demands?
Both.
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The futility of DNS seizures (Score:1)
This quick recovery those counterfeiters managed goes to show just how futile it is to attach the domain name infrastructure for these kinds of infringements. And for obvious reasons... nobody types an URL anymore, they just go to google/bing/whatever. And it's really a point & click matter to have your brand-new replacement domain indexed by them: you just have to fill in a form and watch googlebot crawl your site.
If they had invested all that effort in seizing bank accounts instead (and the warrants t
Problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
ACTUAL crime being committed? Check.
Warrant? Check.
Proper procedure followed? Check.
Crime investigated? Check.
Crime confirmed? Check.
Crime properly documented? Check.
PUBLIC DULY INFORMED???
Check and check.
I don't have a problem with this.
Re:Problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Was the crime committed on U.S. soil or within U.S. jurisdiction?
Yes. That's where they're selling the stuff.
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So if they sell stuff to other countries do they have to abide by their laws as well? What if those laws contradict each other. If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail? The US is treating US laws as though they are the laws of the world. They are not. The US government is only doing this because they can and probably due to corr
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They'd have issues with getting the person extradited, but yes, if you're shipping something to a foreign country, it's your responsibility to know if it's legal. Remember the prince of pot? He would have been fine, but he started shipping to the US where it was illegal. Ultimately, he was extradited and tried.
This is one of the reasons why many companies don't do business internationally, because they're then having to comply with and track all sorts of export regulations that don't apply if you're shippin
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So if they sell stuff to other countries do they have to abide by their laws as well?
Yes. Of course you do.
What if those laws contradict each other.
Then you probably can't do business in that country. There is no inherent right to do business, and no right to make a profit. If you can't do it within the bounds of the law, you can't do it.
If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail?
They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.
The US is treating US laws as though they are the laws of the world. They are not. The US government is only doing this because they can and probably due to corruption. Not because it is proper behavior.
The US is treating properties which are located in the US as subject to US law, which is the natural right of any sovere
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The US is treating properties which are located in the US as subject to US law, which is the natural right of any sovereign nation. Domain names, under the current DNS system, effectively reside in the US because they are managed by ICANN, an organization located in the US. That makes DNS digital property subject to US law.
Not quite correct. The US does not claim jurisdiction over ccTLDs, the TLDs which are delegated down to other countries - which are in fact not managed by ICANN (e.g. Australia's ccTLDs are managed by auDA, New Zealand's by InternetNZ, USA's by NeuStar). There are various reasons for this, but mostly it's the technical near impossibility of injecting a "poisoned" DNS entry for a ccTLD by adding it to the root zone, since most DNS servers won't go all the way to the root servers to ask for a single domain.
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If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail?
They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.
Actually... Until the post 9/11 era it was ab absolute requirement that the crime was indeed a crime in both countries. No problem when it comes to murder and similar, because that's illegal in most countries, but something like a sex toy might be extremely illegal in Saudi Arabia but it sure isn't in more other (civilized) countries. So the people shipping the sex toy would never be eligible to be extradited. Now, some countries have expanded extradition treaties where 'serious crimes' (terror in particula
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Was the crime committed on U.S. soil or within U.S. jurisdiction?
Yes. That's where they're selling the stuff.
Wrong. They're selling the stuff on the Internet. It has no nationality and thus no laws - and thus no crime can be committed.
Some or most of their customers are in the US but that doesn't matter. If they can't touch the manufacturers (that are committing the crimes here) which are physically located in China they can go after the stuff when it hits US soil. They don't need to mess with the Internet in order to stop people from buying this stuff.
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Wrong. They're selling the stuff on the Internet
A sale involves communication with the customer (or in this case, victim, being sold counterfeit goods), involves moving money around, and involves moving goods around. They aren't "selling on the internet," as that's not even possible with physical goods. They are allowing a customer/victim to communicate order and payment info to them across the internet. And then they use the international banking system, which crosses borders and is subject to all sorts of international treaties and arrangements, to ac
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They're selling the stuff on the Internet. It has no nationality and thus no laws - and thus no crime can be committed.
Like ScentCone said, the Internet is merely the way they receive an order. Would it be any different if the customer ordered by phone? Fax? Mail Order?
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Hence the conditions: "Proper procedure followed" and "Actual crime".
If you follow proper procedure, you will determine whether or not you actually have jurisdiction. And in the US, the sale of counterfeit goods-where 'counterfeit' in this case marking the items to look exactly like the genuine article, such as Reebock instead of Reebok- is illegal. So in this instance, they appear to have cleared all those conditions.
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Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law? FAIL.
"Washington, we have a problem." as a RIAA/MPAA driven Justice Department driven by Uncle Tom Obama send justice hurtling out of control. Steal the stuff, fire the employees, threatening them with extended homosexual rape in US prisons (don't deny Americans routinely comment on it and it is publicly acknowledged http://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-show-widespread-prison-rape [hrw.org]).
So forget justice this is all about nothing but a corr
Thus demonstrating... (Score:2)
...that seizing domains does absolutely no good, and that in at least a one case [arstechnica.com], it does significant harm to people who haven't violated the law [slashdot.org].
It's a flawed, ineffective, and destructive policy that can only cause harm and can never have any significant benefit. It needs to be stopped immediately.
Is this the list? (Score:2)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/93228219/Louis-Vuittion-Complaint [scribd.com]
At the end of the page 20 some ~380 domains are listed?
All the Banners (Score:2)
ACTA for only $1,455,438? (Score:2, Interesting)
So according to ACTA promoters, counterfeiting is a $100 billion a year business, and yet these websites combined, resulted in seizure of only $1.5 million??
"Under warrants issued by a U.S. District Judge, law enforcement agents seized $1,455,438.72 in proceeds that had been transferred from the money service business accounts to various bank accounts in China."
I notice they included the decimal point in the story and the fraction which makes the number longer, but it is only $1.5 million, probably far less
How come the buyers (Score:3)
are not being punished? You can't tell me they couldn't get the transaction history from the payment processors.
Twisted, man (Score:2)
This time! It will surely work THIS TIME! (Score:2)