[pp.int.general] U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

[Peter Colton]

Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop 
file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has 
been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain 
of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music 
linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical 
counterfeit goods. 

While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright 
groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say 
“that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts 
torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit 
more difficult. 

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works 
unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it 
of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield – unless you’re ICE 
Homeland Security Investigations that is. 

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an 
ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain. 

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from 
any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this 
morning. 

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the 
DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do 
not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he 
explained. 

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there 
is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only 
does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually 
only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites 
that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner. 

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, 
so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it 
searches are clearly visible in the results shown. 

Yesterday we reported that the domain of hiphop site RapGodFathers had been 
seized and today we can reveal that they are not on their own. Two other 
music sites in the same field – OnSmash.com and DaJaz1.com – have fallen 
to the same fate. But ICE activities don’t end there. 

Several other domains also appear to have been seized including 
2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com, throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, 
lifetimereplicas.com, handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com. 

Domain seizures coming under the much debated ‘censorship bill’ COICA? 
Who needs it? 

Written by enigmax on November 26, 2010 - TorrentFreak
Article 
url:http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-d 
omain-and-more-101126/ 


Regards: Peter 

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