The US is really ramping up its war on intellectual property infringement, a war which I’m sure will be just as successful, cheap and supported by the people as the wars on drugs and terrorism. The US has started seizing the domain names of various websites through ICANN – not because owners of these sites were convicted of anything, but merely because complaints have been filed against them. Anyone want to take a guess how long it will be before the US government blocks WikiLeaks? Update: The blocks function outside of the US too. In other words, the US is forcing its views upon the rest of the world once again.
The current seizures of domains did not even use the proposed bill which recently passed the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The seizures come from the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and cover about 70 websites relating to potential copyright infringement and counterfeit goods, among which is Torrent-Finder.com, a mere torrent search engine which does not host or even link to torrents; it displays content hosted elsewhere through embedded iframes.
“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the owner of Torrent-Finder explained TorrentFreak, “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.”
This is equivalent to having your house seized for pointing out to someone you can buy weed in the college district.
(Read more from osnews.com)