The Feds are Grabbing Domain Names

If you are in the licensed apparel and merchandise business you have reason to be pleased. At least you do if those NFL jerseys you sell are legitimate. If you sell knockoffs you best head for the hills Ma Barker because the feds are looking for you and will seize your domain name if they feel the need.

The Department of Justice and Customs Enforcement have already taken down 130 websites they say were selling fake jerseys and knock-off handbags. They included sites with names such as reeboksite.com, shopsbag.com, verycheapjerseys.com and officialpumashop.com.

This is the third such sweep since 2010. The first took out 82 sites offering illegal music and video downloads. The second came in February 2011 aimed at sports related content streams.Some of whom had no illegal content of their own but merely linked to other sources for the copyright infringing videos.

Now on the surface this make look like a triumph for those in business legally by punishing illegal competition. However, there are some fairly serious questions regarding the legality of the seizures. For example, the domain grabs are made by government agencies without anything even remotely resembling due process. No one is asked to prove their legality, no specific violations are documented, and no warnings given.

It is also easy to question the real effectiveness of the seizures when you consider that it is pretty easy to simply buy a new domain name and have your heinous copyright violating merchandise on the market again. Not to mention that over the course of these seizures no one has been prosecuted for any crime. If copyright violations are so dangerous why leave these criminals loose to menace free enterprise again?

Senator Ron Wyden(D-OR) is not a fan of the domain grabs and made his position clear in a letter to the Immigration and Custom Enforcement director John Morton. His letter said in part,”In contrast to ordinary copyright litigation, the domain name seizure process does not appear to give targeted websites an opportunity to defend themselves before sanctions are imposed. As you know, there is an active and contentious legal debate about when a website may be held liable for infringing activities by its users. I worry that domain name seizures could function as a means for end-running the normal legal process in order to target websites that may prevail in full court. The new enforcement approach used by Operation In Our Sites is alarmingly unprecedented in the breadth of its potential reach.”

One of the domain seized in the great pirated sport broadcasts mentioned above was a site called Rojadirecta.com. A site operated out of Spain and determined legal under Spanish law. SO some questions could be raised over US agencies feeling that they need not consider the legal precedents and concerns of other nations.

Back in May 2011, the Department of Homeland Security demanded that Mozilla, maker of the very popular Firefox web browser, to do away with an add on that would redirect users attempting to visit a seized domain to others hosted outside the US and thus more difficult to shut down. Mozilla refused and the issue is still pending.

While copyright enforcement is an important issue to copyright holders and they are certainly within their rights to bring suit and seek legal remedies, I have to question the expenditure of governmental monies and potential constitutional violations as being an appropriate price to pay to pursue what are low threat crimes and seemingly civil matters.