Feds Seized Website For a Year Without Piracy Proof

bonch writes "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized a hip-hop website based on RIAA claims of copyright infringement for prerelease music tracks. They held it for a year before giving it back due to lack of evidence. Unsealed court records (PDF) show that the government was repeatedly given time extensions to build a case against Dajaz1.com, but the RIAA's evidence never came. The RIAA has declined to comment."

Comments

Not too bad.

[wcrowe]

They only violated four amendments in the Bill of Rights. No big deal.

Re:Year of lost revenue

[houghi]

Please don't make it hard on them. They already loose money on every movie they make.

Re:No recourse

[Nom du Keyboard]

The real troubling fact is that we have no recourse against this sort of criminal behavior by government thugs.

You have recourse. Vote the bastards out!

Privately maintained filter lists are bad

[PhantomHarlock]

It IS censorship, because invariably the list of sites to block includes many that have nothing to do with porn, including fine art nudes, nude paintings. Will Deviantart be on that list?

One only has to look at the leaked proposed Australian list to see how bad it is in real life.

The only way that you could begin to do this is to have an open list that's published, with a redress mechanism for people who's sites have been wrongly blocked. The censors hate this because then it gives people a phone directory for all the naughty sites.

Re:Same with Megaupload

[10101001 10101001]

It bothers me when people put all of their eggs in one basket and something unforeseen happens. If I understand your claim correctly when users upload a file to a website, the original file disappears? This is akin to people who don't test backups, while it sucks, it's your own damned fault.

So, it's their fault the government destroyed their backups? I mean, how do you "test" that the government won't destroy your backups?

PS - By definition, a backup is a second copy. Hence, there was more than "one basket". If nature destroys the original and the government destroys your backup, it can hardly be called "your own damned fault". Now, if you want to argue the actual figure of lost files is probably in the thousands and not in the millions, well that's a different story...