US Homeland Security begins new wave of domain seizures

Despite repeated questions that have been raised about the constitutionality of such actions, U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency began yet another round of domain seizures early this week.

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According to TorrentFreak, six websites were confirmed to have been seized by ICE officials on Monday. Those sites are:

* Re1ease.net
* Watchnewfilms.com
* Dvdcollectionsale.com
* Dvdscollection.com
* Dvdsetsonline.com
* Newstylerolex.com

While four of the seized domains were clearly connected to counterfeit merchandising activities, the remaining two, Re1ease.net and Watchnewfilms.com, were confiscated for infringing upon movie and television copyrights. Those websites did not house any infringing content on their servers, but did link to sources like Veoh.com and Megavideo.com that have been known to stream copyrighted programming.

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This new round of seizures comes just a few weeks following the release of a new antipiracy video campaign by the ICE. That production, which proved nothing more than the fact that guilt and shame can sometimes be an effective tool to use against copyright infringement, was likely about as effective as prior rounds of domains seizures at curbing piracy (that’s to say, not very, since seized domains have a habit of simply popping up shortly thereafter under a new name).

Currently, a fresh controversy is brewing over the new PROTECT IP bill that gives rights holders the ability to initiate action against infringing sites, as well as granting the Justice Department the power to force third party’s to censor certain sites. This bill would take Internet censorship to a whole new level by providing copyright holders the ability to silence an accused website without giving the alleged offender the right to defend themselves, and without government intervention.

Few corporations like Google and government representatives such as Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Zoe Lofgren have opposed these actions that move to limit citizens’ rights, but clearly it is going to take more public outcry for any type of positive change to happen.

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