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Judge Orders Hundreds of Websites Delisted From Search Engines, Social Networks
An anonymous reader writes "A federal judge has ruled that a number of a websites trafficking in counterfeit Chanel goods can have their domains seized and transferred to a new registrar. Astonishingly, the judge also ordered that the sites must be de-indexed from all search engines and all social media websites. Quoting the article: 'Missing from the ruling is any discussion of the Internet's global nature; the judge shows no awareness that the domains in question might not even be registered in this country, for instance, and his ban on search engine and social media indexing apparently extends to the entire world. (And, when applied to U.S.-based companies like Twitter, apparently compels them to censor the links globally rather than only when accessed by people in the U.S.) Indeed, a cursory search through the list of offending domains turns up poshmoda.ws, a site registered in Germany. The German registrar has not yet complied with the U.S. court order, though most other domain names on the list are .com or .net names and have been seized.'"
If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.
There is also European StartPage / Ixquick, but it's more for privacy. It aggregates results from Google and other search engines, so US censors still apply. Yandex and Baidu are completely independant search engines.
Sadly, this is what US has become.
Average person doesn't understand internet. Shocking details and film at 11.
but, but...we own the world...Jesus said so... and we have the debts and the enemies to prove it!
I'm just sayin
Thats the History Eraser Button!
which is the only thing that can remove stuff form the internet.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
That was good enough for Judge Kent Dawson to order the names seized and transferred to GoDaddy
Danica Patrick should be so happy.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
In addition, a total ban on search engine indexing was ordered, one which neither Bing nor Google appears to have complied with yet.
Yeah, good luck with that one judge.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
We still have the biggest army so we rewl the internets machine!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
See what Venkat Balasubramani says about this [1], in detail
An injunction requiring Google to "de-list" sites is one remedy which SOPA expressly makes available, and ordering the registry to transfer domain names to GoDaddy and ordering GoDaddy to update the DNS records is in effect achieving another remedy which SOPA creates. The fight against SOPA may be a red herring in some ways, since IP plaintiffs are fashioning very similar remedies in court irrespective of the legislation. Thus, even if SOPA is defeated, it may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory--opponents may win the battle but may not have gained much as a result.
[1]: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/11/court_oks_priva.htm
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I liked the days when people were afraid if they touched the computer too much it would explode, now they run crazy touching and deleting and legislating like coked out cats.
...for legal ruling in the midst of ignorant and intellectual squalor on the matter, on behalf of the moronic judge at hand.
Dear god somebody kill off or at least properly educate these senile corpses before they ruin things more than they already are with all this blatant stupid.
So they are taking the domains and blacklisting them.
Good luck for the next guy who buys these domains, what a way to ruin a business, buy a domain that is court ordered not to appear in any social networking or search.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Often, when a court does something like this it's because the real world analogy makes sense, but doesn't translate well into electronic contexts. Here it seems to be the opposite: the meatspace equivalent would be to not only shut down a business that is selling counterfeit goods, but also to order that the business be delisted from the Yellow Pages, at the expense of the phone book publisher. I'm confident that this judge would not have done that, but probably imagined that the company is responsible for its presence in search engine results the way it would be responsible for buying advertising space.
.sig withheld by request
WASHINGTON — To mark the official beginning of the online holiday shopping season, known as Cyber Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), the Department of Justice and the FBI Washington Field Office have seized 150 website domain names that were illegally selling and distributing counterfeit merchandise.
source
Not only are there multiple alphabet soups working in collaboration on this, but taxpayer dollars, to use a talking point, tax payer dollars are being used to protect the profits of companies that a) people buying cheap counterfeits don't usually have money to buy the high dollar stuff or choose not to and b) many companies hide their profits overseas to avoid all the tax's imposed on them while simultaneously lobby congress to make import/export easier with the slave friggin labor used to make these fucking pointless articles of consumer whoredom. National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, ie, America production and creation capacity has been reduced to rubbish so we'll sue/block/censor anything that threatens the bank accounts. I'm not a 99%'er and all that jazz; this is a problem between stupid electorate continually rel-electing politicians who do not represent the people and are easily bought out. There are of course many more problems than this, but to boil it down this story is just icing on the turd-cake that will be served to future historians who write about the downfall of America.
Boggles the mind on one hand, on the other hand, well, nothing new under the sun, eh?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Another judge without an f-ing clue.
Lawyers always think they're the smartest guys in the room, and as it turns out, they're very often the dumbest.
Judge lets the world know he is a complete and utter idiot.
sad part is that he will throw a hissy fit that everyone n the planet does not obey him, and he will not bother to get an education to make sure he does not sound like a complete tool again in the future.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Someone should introduce the Internet to this judge.
Judge Smith, this is the Internet.
Internet, this is Judge Smith.
Now f*ck off.
Sig? Heil
You dirty criminal pirate, how dare you link to the Site Which Shall Not Be Named?! Now they are going to sue /. too!
Hand over the top spot for search engines to yandex or baidu. morons.
Read radical news here
The internet was better before the legal system was aware of it. No politicians, no lawyers, no judges. It was run by engineers, for engineers, and everything *seemed to be fine*.
Now....? It's becoming a clusterfuck, because people who don't understand it seem to think they should be able to control it anyway.
An American, thinking that the US = The World?
What a surprise.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Fuck you!
- The rest of the world.
Can't wait for the 2nd decentralized age to happen.
Fuck ICANN too.
This is why you never register your domain in the U.S. For maximum safety, host it overseas too. See http://thespamdiaries.blogspot.com/2008/03/dont-register-or-host-your-domain-in-us.html
Here's the bit that gets to me:
(A recent November 14 order went after an additional 228 sites; none had a chance to contest the request until after it was approved and the names had been seized.)
How were the sites investigated? For the most recent batch of names, Chanel hired a Nevada investigator to order from three of the 228 sites in question. When the orders arrived, they were reviewed by a Chanel official and declared counterfeit. The other 225 sites were seized based on a Chanel anti-counterfeiting specialist browsing the Web.
Check your premises.
This is just freakin' great. I mean...
Fucking. *Brilliant*. Like putting a fire out by trying to stomp it out with explosives brilliant. I wonder if the irony of implementation has even occurred to them.
So...uh...since I wrote an experimental search engine about 6 years ago--can someone provide me with a list of the censored sites? Either the judge or Chanel? I wouldn't want to crawl and index anything inappropriately.
In fact, since this will undoubtedly be difficult to maintain, they'd better host it as an RSS feed for me. I'll even accept other RESTful services like well defined JSON.
Just to be helpful, I'm willing cache and redistribute it for them so everyone knows what to censor...
Implications are great... fraudulent goods will want decently descriptive domain names. And anybody can just run their finger down the list and go to 'chanelknockoffs.ch' to get their fix...
Of course, such a listing would also have to contain the last known IP address to make it easy for me to avoid routing to them in ipv6 tunnels...
So this guy's prevented what exactly... a bit of content inspection? On some domains? In some countries? Let's see you enforce that at badu "your honor"
Did anybody actually read the Ars article? The judge's name is Kent Dawson...
Perhaps Slashdot readers/posters could assist with educating the judge on the finer technical details that make such a ruling impossible to comply with.
If writing letters and mailing them sounds too daunting, some enterprising /,er might enlighten the judge by sending the letter to the HP printer he undoubtedly has in his office.
even though china has a larger standing army then the US....
That's nice. According to [1], the Buffalo Bills offence has the highest average mass per player of any team in the AFC, and are getting their arses kicked. Most battles aren't won or lost by the Zapp Brannigan "wave after wave of men" strategy.
More to the point, China's navy is all but useless. Granted it is gaining power in leaps, but any competent strategic assessment will conclude that it can't hold its own in any deep water engagement with... well, anyone major really. Even Russia's navy (at least the part that managed to bob to the surface) outclasses China's in any meaningful metric. China's force projection ability is really limited to annoying its neighbors.
[1] http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=merron/041124_rankings
Does the court really have the authority to force "all Internet search engines" and "all social media websites" to remove these domain names from their respective websites? It seems like too broad a target for an injunction, but perhaps I'm mistaken?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
It would be an interesting place to run a tor node or torrent site.
It can't be infringing...my site is court ordered not to appear anywhere!
Take that!
The Fine Print: The following link is owned by whoever owns it. We are not responsible for them in any way.
If your business is in the purchasing of expired domains, you have a shitty business and ought to be run out of town on a rail anyway.
We need to figure out some sort of system by which decision-makers (judges, legislators, etc) must have a working knowledge of what they are talking about.
That system is already in place. Legislators rely on experts to bring them up to speed on the specific issues at hand.
We call them lobbyists.
System sucks, don't it.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Legal jurisdiction is law that applies TO courts. This is opposed to law that is applied BY courts. It is Courts, not people, corporations, nations or other entities that may engage court forums to affect resolutions, that are controlled by jurisdiction.
United States courts have United States jurisdiction. Federal United States courts have Constitutional authority to convene in Admiralty jurisdiction, which is the jurisdiction of International Merchant Law. This law settles disputes between merchants in different jurisdictions outside of national jurisdictions, since the merchants' national jurisdictions would each apply to one, but not the other. Admiralty jurisdiction controls in cases between merchants (and on the high seas) only. It cannot control outside the case in the forum. Hence, admiralty cannot close a factory in a sovereign territory, it can only impound goods (which might include broadcast signals) within the court's local reach.
Thus, there is, legally, no way a United States judge may make any decision that may legally bind a person, or control goods, who is, or that are, outside of United States sovereign territorial control. If Google signals, for example, are impounded inside the United States they may not be sent out. Outside of the United States an independent Google partner may continue to distribute the impounded signals, because a United States court has no jurisdiction to interdict there.
If there is some kind of global-international jurisdiction that has been set up in theory by someone, or some group or body, the jurisdiction does not have effect in the United States, because it does not have Constitutional authority. The same will be the case in all other sovereignties, except ones where the global-international jurisdiction has been recognized, ratified and adopted.
To stop counterfeiting, which has gone on for millennia, nations must work together and each deal with the parts within each's borders. The internet has not done anything actually new, it has only sped up the shipping-speed of data-commodities. Draconian cyber-regulations cannot control intellectual property counterfeiting any more than they ever could other forms of counterfeiting. Only the traditional forms of nations working with each other and within their own borders, in the new medium, will be effective.
Looks like you dumarse Americans will soon be able to have your own proxy just like Irans and China to block out the rest of the World.
Nonparties are never bound by court orders.
Even if the ruling is diligently applied by all parties concerned. It would take an operator less than 24 hours to get his business up and running again. These businesses uses spam for marketing anyway. So new domain and a couple of spam shots later and my new web site is as busy as ever. The ruling firstly don't make sense and secondly is not a remedy and will not prevent the offending party from continuing it's business so why waste the money on this order.
The summary and a number of the comments may be going a wee bit overboard while lambasting the order of the court. Any court has a certain jurisdiction, dependent on the constitutions, legislative acts, treaties, and case law within that jurisdiction. How a NY state judge rules doesn't matter to me in HI unless I enter or transact business with NY. This is understood by the NY judge, and is assumed when writing the decision.
Likewise, I could sell material for the NSDAP on-line, and if a German federal judge doesn't like it, tough beans.
What would have caught my attention is if the text of Chanel, Inc v. Does had used the words like global or specifically stipulated a foreign search engine.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It is people like that judge that propagate the American stereotype of being stupid and international bullies. Thankfully, I have only met peaceful Americans with a modicum of intelligence.
More arrogant US BS. And they have issues about china and their restrictions.
are its principal users.
other countries can go after US companies they think are infringing on their products and get the courts to force say Google.fr to de list those US businesses.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This is what comes of the arrogance of power.
SOPA/PIPA delenda est!
The same judge also ordered alll the people who have book marked these sites before the ruling came to remove them from their computers. And if the site has an easy to remember URL, he ordered every one in the world to forget it. And then they all have to get off his lawn too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And gives no fuck, because he's getting paid and you all can go suck his dick.
... dozens of internet companies begin operations in overseas locations, move their headquarters, and ignore judge's ludicrous "order". More at 11.
.....to go and f**** himself I presume?
I don't understand judicial power in these types of things.
What power does a judge have to order a company to modify it's database? Unless that company is named as part of a lawsuit and loses the suit, what power does the judge have to compel any 3rd-party to do anything? Am I compelled by this ruling to delete any bookmarks I have? What if I run my own search engine?what
Child porn has been censored in the US for decades. Has it led to political censorship yet? Nope. Again, you're insane. Paranoid, specifically.
Ok, how about this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Davis
Davis was named the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service in December 2008; and was fired from this job in late November or early December 2009.[20] This occurred because of an op-ed Davis wrote in the Wall Street Journal.[21] Davis criticized a preliminary report from the inter-agency review team President Obama authorized for proposing looser judicial standards when the suspects faced more serious charges.
Davis wrote: "The administration must choose. Either federal courts or military commissions, but not both, for the detainees that deserve to be prosecuted and punished for their past conduct."
More details here http://www.salon.com/2011/11/28/inside_the_attack_on_the_first_amendment/
Slashdot opinion != the law (and thank God for that)
It's really simple : this was said by a judge and is thus (ie. in English common law, like the US) the only valid interpretation of the law (in this specific instance, ymmv, yadda yadda yadda). Although that's not entirely true since this isn't a supreme court case, so in practice if someone actually defends themselves against this, he's probably not going to be bothered by this judgement at all.
This does of course means that it's not the judge that thinks he's above the law, nor chanel, nor "the US", nor the government, but merely that you have a wrong idea about what the law is. You want to change the law, convince your local congress critter, or elect another one.
I would tread carefully, especially in this case. Trademark law is just about the only law that actually gives normal people a chance against domain squatters, that gives you the exclusive right to your own name. Either you seize domains for the "owner" of the name, or you don't. If you don't that means anyone is perfectly at liberty to start a "how to defraud banks" tutorial on a site bearing your name, with obvious consequences.
Entrope, the one he was answering disagrees. So why not get in touch with HIM and tell him that?
so I looked at the list in that document, names like http://www.2012-louisvuitton.net/ and http://www.spotbags.co/ and http://www.hahabags.net/ all that jazz.
If they are now posted on /. will google be forced to delist /. as well?
You can't handle the truth.
genius. :D
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Being bound or not is a practical matter.
Some warlord in Somalia can issue a court order requiring me to do something. If I intend to ignore it then if I ever go to Somalia bad things could happen to me, and if the guy is ticked enough bad things might happen to me here.
Likewise some judge in Nevada can order me to do something, and if I just ignore it they might be able to make bad things happen to me. On the other hand, I might be able to appeal to some other judge with more power to protect me (for example, if I don't live in Nevada then an appeal to the local government will prevent them from shipping me there).
Our situation is not unlike that of a serf. If some noble in the other town feels slighted by us then your only recourse in practice is to appeal to your own local noble for protection (and that "protection" was not unlike what the mob offers today). Most likely the local noble isn't going to want to start a war over you, but they will insist that they be the ones to administer the punishment since that asserts their authority over their land. Perhaps to further assert their authority they might reduce the sentence a little as well. The bottom line, however, is none of these people are really looking out for you - you're just a pawn in a game that is more about the power/relationships at the top.
If Chanel is going to own all of the sites then do they want them delisted? If Chanel owns the domain names they can, and should, put their product up, legitimately and leave the current links alone. They should be begging the judge to not delist the sites.
This shows a profound lack of understanding about the Internet by this judge. This judge should be recused from all further cases concerning the Internet until the judge takes some classes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.
Yes, if you rather have your search results filtered by Russia or China. Yeah, communist shadow filtering where you can't see the invisible hand hiding sites is SO much better than most US court filtering that are open enough to actually be published, and not themselves censored.
Yandex and Baidu are completely independant search engines.
Maybe on Bizarro World, not on Earth. Independent from aggregate results of other engines, but not independent from censorship. Baidu might possibly the most heavily filtered site on the planet.
I8-D
"If I don't care about sealing quality why would I get a Rolex in the first place?"
You wouldn't. You'd get a replica.
Of course, if you WERE worried about sealing quality, you wouldn't get a Rolex either. You'd get a divers watch.
But if you wanted to show off, you'd get a Rolex.
And if you wanted to show off but didn't have the money for a Rolex, you'd get a Rolex knock-off.
PS if you know a Rolex costs $15k and you're offered one for $150, do you REALLY think that it's genuine and not stolen?
When do we start penalising web developers who are paid to put up sites like these?
is a moron.
I understand the idea behind the ruling, and understand the insensitive cloddiness of the judge here. But I can't help but ask:
What about those who do not care to have an authentic (insert designer here) bag? Speaking as a husband, it's overpriced BS. Surprisingly, my wife would prefer a knockoff bag, because that extra cash allows her to get a non-knockoff luxury car, or a vacation later. While also frivolous, there are still priorities that are being followed.
The real question is: if a company creates knockoffs, and sells them openly as knockoffs, not trying to tell you it is the real thing, where does this stand?
The Paranoia rulebook is unusual in a number of ways; demonstrating any knowledge of the rules is forbidden, and most of the rulebook is written in an easy, conversational tone that often makes fun of the players and their characters, while occasionally taking digs at other notable role-playing games. Source
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World