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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."
Can't wait until the same heros are in charge of my healthcare. Oh wait, they already are...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I want to know the identity of this rookie college moron.
I also want to know which college trained him, so I can make sure to tell everybody to avoid that garbage establishment.
Next, since this was based upon false evidence, I want to see him, and those responsible for handling him, sued into oblivion.
... and I want to see a photo of this rookie.
This shit is getting to a breaking point.
No, please have an enema before seeing me, I don't like my banana brown.