At a Silicon Valley legal conference in early March, California Congresswoman and lawyer Zoe Lofgren spoke out against the recent US government seizure of 84,000 websites and mistaken accusations of child pornography, stating that the owners should sue government officials for violating their rights. RIAA Executive VP Mitch Glazier then fired back at Lofgren’s assessment of the situation, spouting his organization’s traditional rebuttal about piracy costing the country “billions of dollars and thousands of jobs” and reiterating Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief John Morton’s assessment that no due process is necessary when there is evidence of a crime.
But Lofgren has not backed down on her stance as RIAA officials had hoped, and the congresswoman participated in an interview this week to further explain her views about the government’s seizure of domains and the effect the process has on business owners.
“Their apparent complete disregard of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act remedies, where Congress laid out a scheme where you get notice and takedown—that's the way you deal with this,” Lofgren told ArsTechnica, criticizing the ICE’s ambush tactics that give owners no warning and little recourse. "They never apparently even inquired about that."
“Further, I think it's just stunning to think that they would believe that linking sites—they went after Torrent Finder. It's a search engine! What's that got to do with this? I mean, if they're right that they can simply seize that search engine, they can seize Yahoo or Google or Facebook,” the congresswoman continued.
When asked about the RIAA’s assertion that the ICE domain seizures are like any other situation where the government seizes personal property over suspicion of a crime, Lofgren responded, “I've not yet talked to some of the individuals, but we've had second-hand reports of people in the child pornography takedown whose businesses were essentially destroyed. There's hardly anything you can say. It's worse than accusing somebody of being a pedophile."
“[The RIAA] completely missed the point, and I would think intentionally so,” Lofgren continued. “This is prior restraint of speech, and you can't do that in America.”
Lofgren also criticized the ICE for not taking care of other issues like counterfeit drugs, which could actually cause physical harm to citizens, and taking the “easy” route of targeting small “mom & pop” businesses that cannot afford the legal representation to defend themselves against accusations from large corporations.
Rep. Lofgren makes some excellent points here, and it’s difficult to believe that there are not more government officials speaking out about this issue. Hopefully her openness about her legal opinion regarding the domain seizures will help raise awareness with some of her colleagues to help put a stop to this insanity.
