Peter Walker of UK newspaper The Guardian reports that United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is looking to extradite owners of websites it believes are breaking US copyrights – even if their servers are not based in America or are legal in their own countries. The rationale is that the use of generic top level domain names like .com and .net, administered by Verisign in the US, provides “nexus” thus giving them jurisdiction. At issue is the case of tvshack.net – a linking site run by British student Richard O’Dwyer. The domain already was seized by ICE. O’Dwyer now faces extradition. Walker quotes ICE Assistant director Erik Barnett:
“Without wishing to get into the particulars of any case, the general goal of law enforcement is to arrest and prosecute individuals who are committing crimes. That is our goal, our mission. The idea is to try to prosecute.”
On linking:
“I’ll give you an analogy. A lot of drug dealing is done by proxy – you rarely give the money to the same person that you get the dope from. I think the question is, are any of these people less culpable?”
In England there are calls to amend the extradition agreement with the US so that a UK judge can decide jurisdiction on individual cases..
On Mar 1 2011 the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet held a hearing “Oversight of the Office of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator†wherein they grilled U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, aka White House ‘IP Czar’. In the course of the proceedings Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D – CA) took Espinel to task on several counts concerning the recent ICE “Operation In Our Sites†domain seizures – due process; ignoring DMCA provisions; first amendment rights; fair use considerations; plus bumbled operations, receiving little more than platitudes in response. Video is here or below.
In contrast to Feb 15’s Hillary Clinton speech about Internet Freedom on Feb. 16 2011, Â the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing entitled “Targeting Websites Dedicated To Stealing American Intellectual Property“. This was a followup to last year’s shelving of the COICA Act and the recent DHS-ICE site seizures – which some consider to be of dubious legality. Witnesses include representatives of the Authors Guild, Go Daddy, Verizon, and Visa. There was be a webcast.
Witness Statements
Tom Adams – Rosetta Stone Inc
Scott Turow – Authors Guild
Christine Jones – Go Daddy
Thomas Dailey – Verizon
Denise Yee – Visa
Member Statements
Patrick Leahy Chair
Chuck Grassley
Al Franken
Mike Masnick of techdirt argues that recent seizures of domain names by Homeland Security’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group have dubious legal validity. Even the Supreme Court’s embrace of the concept of “inducement as contributory infringement” in the Grokster case didn’t contemplate it as criminal activity.
The actual seizure itself was handled clumsily, using outside contractors. The tracking of visitors to the seized sites contrary to government policy led many observers to initially conclude the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. This was compounded by the ICE delaying public statements so they could make a splash on “Black Monday”. Techdirt further noted in December just how inept and flimsy the case against one site – torrent-finder – was. If the standard – commercial sites that link to web items that advocate or facilitate filesharing – was applied across the board, the ICE would have to seize a large portion of the entire web!