DHS Seized Domains Based On Bad Evidence

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."

Comments

Larger Scale Than One Agent

[eldavojohn]

From the NYTimes article:

The agent also said the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade groups for the major film studios and record labels, had confirmed that the music and movies on the sites had not been released with the authorization of their copyright holders.

Yeah, after some poking around I found PROTECTING U.S. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OVERSEAS: THE JOINT STRATEGIC PLAN AND BEYOND presented to a House of Representatives committee. In it they talk about the sting and the lengthy history of their actions:

We worked with many different agencies - including CBP, DOJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and the Government of Mexico’s Treasury and Customs – and industry, including the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA), to target importers and distributors of counterfeit goods. This operation was specifically timed to coincide with U.S. and Mexican consumers’ increased purchasing during the winter holiday season.

Then later:

Representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and RIAA assisted participating customs authorities with focused training, targeting and analyses of certain interdicted parcels. This operation was specifically timed by the IPR Center to coincide with the movie industry’s summer releases, when the biggest blockbusters are illegally recorded, reproduced on DVDs, shipped around the world and sold on street corners and in other markets.

There's plenty of interesting tidbits in this lengthy document about how everybody's getting involved -- even China:

ICE previously worked with China in September 2003 when ICE initiated Operation Spring, a joint IPR investigation by ICE agents and Chinese authorities that resulted in the extradition and conviction of DVD pirate Randolph Guthrie, who was sentenced to 48 months incarceration and ordered to repay $878,793 in restitution to the MPAA.

And the American sports associations:

Earlier this year, the IPR Center partnered with the NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, industry and local law enforcement to conduct operations targeting counterfeit sports merchandise sold during the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Game, Stanley Cup championship, and NCAA Final Four and Frozen Four tournaments. These operations resulted in seizures of over 14,000 counterfeit items valued at more than $760,000.

Personally I hope DHS and ICE get their asses handed to them over the music blogs. Turn that into freedom of speech and take those bastards to the cleaners. They aren't going to learn their lesson if this is just a court case that exonerates the defendant and I hope the defendants have enough cash to to fight back, or seek help from the EFF.

The frequency of these MPAA/RIAA related stings is really ramping up. I hope ICE and IPR aren't turning out to be directional attack dogs for corporations. The numbers on these things seem a tad bit inflated but haven't they always been?

Re:Healthcare

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The US government is a very large organization. It does a lot of different things. Some things it does well, other things it does badly. Some of the people who work for it do their jobs well, others do their jobs badly. Some types of people take some kinds of jobs, others take other types of jobs. There is no one "the government" doing everything the same way. Welcome to the real world.