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DHS Seized Domains Based On Bad Evidence

Posted by Soulskill on from the legal-systems-and-intertubes-don't-mesh dept.

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."

7 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. What they are trying to do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Their job is to protect us. Let's not make it anymore difficult.

    1. Re:What they are trying to do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Have you listened to that stuff? You should be grateful.

  2. Re:Healthcare by Spad · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why else would the TSA be carrying out all those testicular cancer screenings at airports?

  3. Not to worry! by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Funny

    They'll move him out of DNS management and over into drafting Network Neutrality regulation. What can go wrong?

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  4. Re:I hope FOX digs in here by Haedrian · · Score: 4, Funny

    Filesharing leads to communism
    Communism leads to extremism
    Extremism leads to terrorism

    Support your local Homeland Security today!

  5. Re:Margaret A. Nagle, U.S. Magistrate Judge by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Funny

    You're an American citizen

    I've no idea why you'd think that, but the British spellings in my posts might be a hint that I'm not...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  6. Re:I hope FOX digs in here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I really hope the Republicans make a civil rights issue out of this.

    Yeah, I expect Fox to jump RIGHT on a story about corporations using the government to stomp on people. They'll run it right after the story calling for Shrub to stand trial for war crimes, before the bit about HELL FREEZING OVER.