The money will make it possible for police departments to dedicate more personnel to fight intellectual property “theft”, and counter the claimed devastation of individual lives and legitimate businesses that comes with it.

“Without question, these new investments are coming at a critical time. As our country continues to recover from once-in-a-generation economic challenges, the need to defend IP rights – and to protect Americans from IP theft – has never been more urgent,” Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Holder also used the announcement to emphasize the successes booked by the Justice Department so far, achievements not just limited to the homeland either. Holder explains that the department has schooled thousands of people across the world on piracy and counterfeiting issues.

“Because IP crime is global in nature, I’ve prioritized increasing our international engagement. In fact, to date, Department officials have trained, educated, and met with thousands of foreign judges, prosecutors, investigators, and policymakers from more than 100 countries on IP protection,” Holder noted.

While it is no secret that the U.S. is helping foreign countries rewrite their copyright laws, it came as a surprise to us that judges are also being influenced by the Justice Department. Judges are supposed to be impartial and are generally quite aware of the law already.

However, Holder’s comments suggest that the U.S. was able to school judges on IP crime.

While this may have worked in some cases, there are signs that not all upholders of the law are siding with the U.S. stance. Talking about copyright related issues, New Zealand’s District Court Judge David Harvey criticized the U.S. push for harsher copyright laws.

“..we have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S,” Harvey said, a comment that made him later resign from the Kim Dotcom extradition battle.

That brings us to the Megaupload case, which was also referenced by Holder in his speech. According to the Attorney General the controversial raids and arrests are something to gloat about.

“In this year alone, we have prosecuted a number of significant IP cases,” Holder states.

“For example, in January – in one of the largest criminal copyright cases in U.S. history – the Department indicted two corporations and seven individuals with operating an international organized criminal enterprise responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites.”

This is an interesting comment since the Megaupload prosecution has been widely criticized by legal experts and it may yet turn out to be a fiasco for the Justice Department. Thus far most successes have been claimed by Kim Dotcom and his legal team.

But perhaps, with the proper education and training of New Zealand judges, the Justice Department will be able to turn the case in their favor.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Lowellsfacts.com, was a domain operated by anti-vaccine and self-described “medical research” and “truth information” blogger Lowell Hubbs. Others who appear to know the guy much better than us describe him as a deranged “batshit” conspiracy theorist, but since we do file-sharing news here at TorrentFreak and not pharmaceuticals or psychiatric studies, others more knowledgeable than us can decide if that’s a reasonable assessment.

We’re interested in something else; if Lowellsfacts.com was not a site offering unauthorized files or peddling counterfeit products, why would the feds seize it and put up the all too familiar ‘copyright’ notice?

Well, according to Lowell Hubbs himself, he’s the victim of foul play.

“Apparently, as I was told; there are links or hidden links hacked into my site that go to illegal porn and as well likely music down loads or movies, or links to counterfeit something,” Hubbs explains.

“I don’t know what is in there personally, nor how they did it, and I don’t know yet all of what is going on; I am just getting beginning information, by someone who has looked into it and is more knowledgeable than I as to computer systems,” Hubbs adds.

In a later update, Hubbs announced that he had found the problem. He asserts that someone had indeed hacked into this website and put up 17 pages and 70gig of files. He insists, however, that none of this is down to him.

“How in the hell would I have acquired anything like that? For anyone to believe I am responsible for that, I can tell you – you are flatout-insane!” he exclaims.

“Anyone with any common sense looking at this picture, would know the chance of that is zero! Period. Nice try though, just one more attempt to falsely destroy me, and a huge one. There is nothing these people will stop at in attempting to do so. Too much truth.”

If the claims of Hubbs being a conspiracy theorist are true, then this seizure – whether warranted or otherwise – is a gift to his cause, whatever that might be. Whether or not it will be a gift to the big pharmaceutical companies he’s been bad-mouthing for sometime will remain to be seen.

Hubbs’ site is now back up at VacFacts.info and aside from questionable content and quite a lot of cut and pastes, it doesn’t look like a hub of wanton copyright infringement or counterfeiting to us, at least in its current form.

Admittedly there are a multitude of worrying claims about Hubbs on the web (which we aren’t in a position to verify) and he clearly has dozens of enemies and it is feasible that ICE had good reasons to shut him down. That said, Hubbs doesn’t appear to have been informed about why his domain was taken and he’s clearly not under arrest.

So why has ICE seized the domain and put up the copyright notice? If we had some due process, some proper hearings which allow the facts to come out into the open and disputed or confirmed, any claims of copyright infringement could be assessed. As usual the public is in the dark.

Conspiracy theories can be dangerous things, and the information vacuum along with this very strange domain seizure simply throws fuel on the fire.

Update: It seems that Lowell Hubbs has some other conspiracies to think about today. Ars managed to speak with ICE who denied the seizure.

“It’s hard to say definitely what happened here, but it sounds a lot like someone disgusted by Hubbs’ anti-vaccine activism and paranoia hacked into his site, perhaps uploaded some porn just for fun, then pointed the site’s DNS record toward the ICE takedown banner.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Following on from the most recent set of seizures in February, yesterday’s action represents the fourth phase of the operation. The following six domains were taken:

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

Today the list has grown again to include the following:

* mygolfaccessory.com
* overbestmall.com

TorrentFreak managed to catch up with PiraCee, an admin at Re1ease.net, a portal that did not host any copyrighted material itself but linked to movie and TV shows on sites like Megavideo.com.

“We were not informed [that the seizure was imminent] in any way,” he told us. “I was just presented with the ICE image upon doing a page refresh.”

For those unfamiliar with the site, Re1ease.net was founded following PiraCee’s split with Ninjavideo.net in late 2008. NinjaVideo, readers will recall, succumbed to ICE raids in 2010 and never recovered.

While undoubtedly quite busy with around 10,000 visitors a day, Re1ease.net was not one the largest sites of its type on the Internet. Indeed, others with significantly higher levels of traffic remain intact, untouched by ICE.

“I don’t believe we were doing anything wrong at all. Many higher profile sites remain unaffected,” PiraCee told us.

So why was Re1ease singled out? Despite being operated from outside the United States, did they have a bad attitude to DMCA takedowns perhaps?

“We have only ever had two DMCA takedown requests – for Source Code and Hobo With a Shotgun,” PiraCee told us. “We removed both.”

But despite losing their domain, a body-blow event for any site, Re1ease.net aren’t giving in.

“We will be back,” said PiraCee, as the site mulled over a possible domain change this morning. “Give us about a week.”

That was a few hours ago though, and things move very quickly in this game.

“Scrrls.net will be our new domain and will be up and running soon as we fix our backend,” PiraCee assured us. Indeed, it appears to be fully functioning now.

TorrentFreak continues to monitor developments in phase 4 of Operation in Our Sites and if any additional domains are seized we will update this report.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The site has well over a million visitors a day, and is listed among the 100 most popular sites in Spain in terms of traffic. This morning, however, visitors were surprised by a warning from US authorities. Continuing the previous “Operation in Our Sites” actions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had seized Rojadirecta’s .org domain.

Rojadirecta is an unusual target for several reasons, not least because the site has been declared legal twice by Spanish courts. The site’s owners have previously fought a three year legal battle in Spain, which they won, but a single seizure warrant from US authorities has made this victory pointless.

Without receiving a notification or the option to defend themselves, the site’s domain was seized this morning.

“We have not been notified,” Rojadirecta’s Igor Seoane told TorrentFreak. As with the previous seizures the domain registrar was bypassed in the seizure. “According to Go Daddy they have not touched anything,” Seoane said.

Similar to BitTorrent sites, Rojadirecta doesn’t host any copyrighted material. Instead, it indexes HTTP links to sports streams that can already be found on the Internet, and also carries links to .torrent files which are hosted on other sites.

The site is owned by a Spanish company that pays its taxes and has been declared to operate legally in Spain. In addition, the site is not hosted in the US either. The only connection to the US is that the .org domain is maintained by a US company.

This indirect connection to the US makes the seizure a dubious action, according to Rojadirecta’s owner. “In our opinion the US authorities are completely despising the Spanish justice system and sovereignty,” Seoane told TorrentFreak.

At the moment Rojadirecta displays the same message from DOJ and ICE as the sites seized last year, including Torrent-Finder. It is expected that Rojadirecta is one of the first of a new list of seized domains.

The sports streaming and P2P link site is currently looking for legal advice, both in Spain and the US, and its owners are determined to fight the seizure with all means they have.

Despite losing the .org domain, Rojadirecta can still be accessed via rojadirecta.com, rojadirecta.es, rojadirecta.me, rojadirecta.in. The latter two domains are interestingly enough maintained by the same company as the .org domain, but Rojadirecta ensures us that they have many other domains that are not controlled by US authorities or companies.

The seizure of Rojadirecta shows that commercial interests are high on the agenda of the US Government. Seizing a domain that has been specifically declared to operate legally in other countries does not appear to be an obstacle. In this light, one has to wonder if generic domain names should be controlled exclusively by US companies.

Update: The owner of Channelsurfing.net informed us that his site was seized as well. Channelsurfing embedded videos from other sites and never hosted any copyrighted material on its servers.

Update: We published a follow up article here.

Update: Atdhe.net has been seized as well, another sports related site.

Update: firstrow.net has been seized, yet another sports related site.

Update: ilemi.com has been seized, yet another sports related site.

Update: kingdom-kvcd.net was initially reported to be seized as well (image), but the site’s owner told us that this is due to a “huffy ex-staff member” who decided to point the DNS to the server where the other seized domains are hosted.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Torrent-Finder’s owner Waleed Gadelkareem was genuinely surprised by the actions of the US authorities and said earlier that he is determined to fight the seizure. He suspected that the authorities had made a mistake and hired a lawyer to help him with the legal proceedings.

Torrent-Finder’s lawyer David Snead called the seizure “a stretch of the law,” and today it became apparent just how far the law was stretched by the authorities. The application for the seizure warrant was just sent to us by Torrent-Finder’s owner and on first reading several painful mistakes stand out.

To start off the affidavit shows that the authorities worked closely with the MPAA, and the movie industry lobby group is cited multiple times to confirm various claims. In addition, a highly disputed MPAA study is used to signify the severity of movie piracy, despite the fact that it was called into doubt by the Government Accountability Office just a few months ago.

The general description of Torrent-Finder and the four music linking sites that were included in the affidavit are not completely accurate either. The sites are described by Homeland Security’s Special Agent Reynolds as being among the most popular of their kind, but in the case of Torrent-Finder.com we can easily list a few dozen BitTorrent sites that have more visitors.

This investigation has identified five linking, cyberlocker or Bit torrent websites that are among the most popular such websites on the internet for distributing illegal copies of movies, television shows, software and music files.

Aside from the fact that describing the site as one of the most popular of its type is a bit misleading, the core issue is whether Torrent-Finder is indeed a site which use is to distribute illegal copies of movies and music.

To make his case, agent Reynolds characterizes Torrent-Finder as a linking site, which generally “collect and catalog links to files on third party sites that contain illegal copies of copyrighted content, including movies, television shows, software and music.” This description doesn’t really seem to apply to Torrent-Finder.com.

Torrent-Finder does not catalog or collect any files, it simply allows people to search several torrent search engines or indexes. Also, these other torrent search engines do not host any copyrighted material either, but only torrent files that may or may not point to copyrighted content.

Another claim from Homeland Security’s Special Agent Reynolds is that the news section on the site was another indication that Torrent-Finder was aiding criminal copyright infringement. He describes it as follows:

I was able to view posts by the user “Torrent Finder,” including “Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent,” “Piracy in The Music Industry,” “The First Episode of ‘The The Walking Dead’ Leaks to BitTorrent,” and “Piracy domain seizure bill gains support.”

This is interesting to say the least, because all these articles from the news section are in fact copies from articles that came from TorrentFreak and other sites. Torrent-Finder used our site as a news source and shared the articles with the users of the site.

From reviewing these posts by the user “Torrent Finder,” I learned that the above -referenced postings contained links and information to pirated movies including “Wall Street Never Sleeps,” “The Social Network,” “Red,” and other movies.

This appears to be another painful mistake. Not only have two of the four articles nothing to do with pirated content, the ones that do are news items that do not link to torrent files or any copyrighted files. A screenshot copy of our “Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent” article is nevertheless included as evidence in the affidavit.

Ironically, the “Piracy domain seizure bill gains support” article comes from CNET and covers the COICA law that would grant US authorities the power to seizure domains, in a similar fashion to what they did with Torrent-Finder.

The seizure application then continues to describe how the Torrent-Finder site works, and the “Downloads of Infringing Content via Torrent-Finder.com” is particularly interesting. Here, Special Agent Reynolds described how the site can be used to download torrent files from external sites.

Although the description itself is fairly accurate, the same section would also apply to every other search engine including Google and Bing. Downloading torrents via Torrent-Finder involves exactly the same steps as downloading torrents via a web search engine, nothing more nothing less.

Another part of the affidavit that stands out is the fact that the proposed seizure has not been carried out properly. According to the affidavit, the authorities should present the warrant to both the registrar (Godaddy) and the registry (Verisign). The registrar would then have to replace the domain name’s technical and administrative contacts with that of the authorities, but this never happened.

Although we’re not legal experts, in our opinion there were enough mistakes made in the affidavit to warrant an appeal against the seizure and get the domain transferred back to the original owner. In order to achieve this, Torrent-Finder’s owner is willing to put up a fight.

“My concern now is to get back my domain. Not because I do business with it, but because it was the first domain I bought and the first idea that I developed. It has been mine since then and I WILL NOT give it away because the USA government is testing a new bill,” Waleed said, referring to the COICA bill that would make such domain seizures standard procedure.

In the coming days Waleed and his lawyer will consider what steps to take next, and we expect that this will not be the last time we report on this unique case.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All this time the authorities remained silent on the purpose and scope of the actions, until today. Apparently the DOJ and ICE had picked the label “Cyber Monday Crackdown” for their actions, and this meant that they couldn’t release their statement earlier.

However, today a press release was finally issued, detailing which sites were targeted and why.

“As of today – what is known as ‘Cyber Monday’ and billed as the busiest online shopping day of the year – anyone attempting to access one of these websites using its domain name will no longer be able to make a purchase. Instead, these online shoppers will find a banner notifying them that the website’s domain name has been seized by federal authorities,” it was announced.

“The coordinated federal law enforcement operation targeted online retailers of a diverse array of counterfeit goods, including sports equipment, shoes, handbags, athletic apparel and sunglasses as well as illegal copies of copyrighted DVD boxed sets, music and software.”

“By seizing these domain names, we have disrupted the sale of thousands of counterfeit items, while also cutting off funds to those willing to exploit the ingenuity of others for their own personal gain,” said Attorney General Holder in a subsequent press release.

Since 95% of the domains were related to counterfeit goods, this explanation was kind of expected, but one question remains unanswered. In fact, this is the question that prompted so many news outlets to pick up the story over the last few days.

Those who took a careful look at the list of seized domains will have noticed that there are some odd entries. Among the replica watches and fake sport shirts are three sites that were directly or indirectly linking to music. That’s not counterfeiting, although releasing music before it hits the stores is a criminal act so these targets can be explained.

But there’s an even stranger entry, and that is Torrent-Finder.

Torrent-Finder is not a typical torrent site where one can download torrent files. It’s merely a meta-search engine that redirects users to other sites. The site simply displays a search box and has no browsable archive. The site is not encouraging or even facilitating copyright infringement any more than other search engines such as Google.

So the question that we’d like to see answered is what the grounds were to seize Torrent-Finder? Could it have been a mistake? Or perhaps a test?

If the US authorities were to target BitTorrent sites then Torrent-Finder is arguably the least likely target. Still, the owner lost its domain without even receiving a notice. That doesn’t seen right somehow.

If it’s so easy for the US Government to obtain a seizure order for a website that is simply a meta-search engine, and not by any means involved in linking to or hosting copyrighted material, then where does it stop?

Meanwhile, TorrentFreak has been made aware of (many) additional domains that are on a Government seizure list. More info on this is expected to trickle in later in the week and might reveal more about the future direction of Operation In Our Sites 2 after “Cyber Monday Crackdown.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A week later the U.S. Government took action against nine websites suspected of promoting copyright infringement by seizing their domains. The targets were mostly movie streaming sites, but it later became apparent the The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload had also been considered. They have escaped for now.

Taking the domains of suspected sites has proven to be a highly effective tool to shut down sites that are considered illegal, and today a group of US senators proposed legislation to make this a standard procedure.

If signed into law, the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (pdf via TL) would allow the Department of Justice to file a civil lawsuit against the domain owners. If the courts decide that a site is indeed promoting copyright infringement, the DOJ can order the domain registrar to take the domain offline.

“The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act will give the Department of Justice an expedited process for cracking down on these rogue Web sites regardless of whether the Web site’s owner is located inside or outside of the United States,” Senator Orin Hatch said.

According to Senator Hatch the new legislation is needed because the Internet has “become a tool for online thieves to sell counterfeit and pirated goods, making hundreds of millions of dollars off of stolen American intellectual property.” When and if the proposed legislation will be signed into law will be decided later.

Aside from the classic ‘pirate’ websites the proposed bill can be an effective tool to take the whistleblower site Wikileaks offline, the domain at least. After all, Wikileaks posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States.

If the proposal is accepted it will change the Internet and how domain names are controlled for good. Thus far, no central Government has the power to take over domains. This power belongs exclusively to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

As if he saw it coming, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom already warned against the legislation that was proposed by US senators today.

“If governance were to become the exclusive province of nation states or captured by any other interests, we would lose the foundation of the Internet’s long-term potential and transformative value,” Beckstrom said last week.

The other interests would be those of the movie studios and record labels in this case.

The MPAA has already applauded the introduction of the bill and offered their full cooperation. “In the coming weeks, we look forward to working with Chairman Leahy and the Senate and House committees to help strengthen the bill,” MPAA’s Bob Pisano said.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.