US DOJ Drops Charges Against Two Seized Websites

angry tapir writes "The U.S. Department of Justice has dropped its case against two Spanish websites that stream sports events nearly 17 months after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized the sites and shut them down for alleged copyright violations. In a one-page brief to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the district said his office had dropped the case against Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org. ICE seized the two sites on Jan. 31, 2011, and the DOJ asked the court to order that Puerto 80 Projects, the owner of the sites, forfeit the sites to the U.S. government."

Comments

Re:"forfeit the sites to the U.S. government"

[LordLucless]

It doesn't require any action by the owners. The US government (well, DOJ) contacts the registrar, and demands that they point the domain somewhere else. They don't touch the physical hardware (unless they're seizing that too) - the site is still operational, but cannot be accessed by its domain.

Re:No even a "we're sorry?"

[f3rret]

Isn't the .com and .org TLDs American? They only seized the domains and not necessarily the server hardware, as I understand it. Besides if the sites were running off American TLDs and were hosted in the US then it's no wonder that a US agency could seize them.

Re:DNS = FAIL

[cpghost]

Yes, the hierarchical nature of DNS invites exactly this kind of abuse. However, to be fair: designers of the DNS never expected this kind of lawfare. They thought about cities being nuked etc..., not about a rogue government controlling the top-level of the DNS hierarchy.

As to countries going offline when a submarine cable is being cut, it's their problem: they were supposed to provide some levels of redundancy by connecting to multiple international backbones in the first place.