Although there appeared to be no legal basis for the requests, India-based registrar PublicDomainRegistry (PDR) was quick to suspend several domains, including those belonging to Extratorrent.com and SumoTorrent.com, some of the largest torrent indexes on the web today.

The Canadian company easyDNS responded very differently. The company is outraged by the seemingly unsubstantiated police threats and has refused to take action, arguing that the police request has no legal basis.

EasyDNS’s approach was welcomed by the operators of several torrent sites, and motivated the owner of three domains to transfer his suspended domains from PDR to easyDNS. However, this was easier said than done, as the Indian registrar is refusing to transfer the domains out without the blessing of City of London Police.

After inquiries from easyDNS and the domain owner PDR did restore the original nameservers, but the domain names in question remain locked.

According to easyDNS this refusal to transfer the domains goes against the policy of domain regulation body ICANN, and this week the Canadian company took action against PDR.

EasyDNS filed a Request For Enforcement (RFE) with Verisign, the registry responsible for .COM/.NET domains. Through this enforcement request easyDNS hopes that PDR can be compelled to transfer-out three domains, as ICANN’s Tranfers Dispute Resolution Policy prescribes.

In a blog post easyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic voices his disbelief over PDR’s stubborn refusal to cooperate.

“It’s hard to understand why they are taking their marching orders directly from the UK Police, given the stated aims of the London Police ICPU (to shut down the domains of websites they have summarily declared to be criminal) it’s not likely that they will admit the truth of the matter,” Jeftovic notes.

“In other words, the London Police are not going to come back and tell them: ‘Since we don’t have a court order, we guess you have to let those domains transfer away to some other registrar who has a better understanding of the utter lack of legal basis behind these takedowns than you do’,” he adds.

Instead of waiting for a green light from the City of London Police, Jeftovic believes PDR should comply with the rules and regulations of ICANN as all other domain name registrars do.

“They should not be waiting for the London Police to articulate this, what they should be doing is reading up on the ICANN Inter-Registrar Transfers Policy, since they are actually bound by their Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) to abide by it,” Jeftovic says.

TorrentFreak contacted the apparent operator of the three domain names in question but we are yet to receive a response.

The City of London Police crackdown has had minimal impact thus far, as all affected sites we are aware of have continued their operations under new domain names.

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

There appeared to be no legal basis for the requests, something which outraged Canada-based EasyDNS who refused to comply with a suspension request for meta-search engine TorrentPond.com

To get the lowdown on the latest developments and in order to be absolutely sure that there is no formal legal process underway, TorrentFreak spoke with City of London Police. They told us that in the summer they began a campaign to target websites “that attract visitors by providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content for criminal gain” and that the project is now in new hands.

“In September the project was taken on by the City of London Police’s new Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit [PIPCU], which has been set up to target serious and organized intellectual property crime affecting physical and digital goods, with a specific focus on offences committed online,” a spokesman confirmed.

“The latest stage of Operation Creative, as it is now known, involves contacting registrars whose website domains have been identified as involved in facilitating criminal copyright infringement under UK law and as result are potentially breaching the terms and conditions of the registrars. PIPCU are then requesting the registrars adhere to their terms and conditions and take consideration to suspending the supplied domain.”

So, while the police are stating that the domain registrars are involved in facilitating a crime, there is no formal legal process which establishes either that or whether the torrent and other file-sharing sites involved are actually illegal under UK law.

Given the status of The Pirate Bay and sites like KickassTorrents in the UK it’s certainly possible they are, but none of the sites are based in the UK.

Legal certainty would of course be of some comfort to registrars trying to decide the best course of action in these cases. However, for PDR Ltd, the company we yesterday revealed as suspending the domains of ExtraTorrent and three other MP3 sites, no such reassurance was needed.

So far PDR Ltd have failed to respond to our requests for comment, but according to Mark Jeftovic of EasyDNS, they may now need to think again.

“Any of those registrars that actually complied with the UK requests to bring down the torrent domains *must* allow those domains to simply transfer out, or they themselves will be in violation of the ICANN transfers policy,” Jeftovic told TorrentFreak this morning.

The problem is that the suspended domains are effectively seized and out of the control of their owners. This, Jeftovic notes, leaves the registrar exposed to the wrath of ICANN.

“Since there were no charges against any of the domains and no court orders, it may be at the registrars’ discretion to play ball with these ridiculous demands. However – what they clearly cannot do now, is prevent any of those domain holders from simply transferring out their names to more clueful, less wimpy registrars,” Jeftovic explains.

“If any of those registrars denied the ability to do that, then they would be in clear violation of the ICANN Inter-Registrars Transfer Policy.”

According to that policy, registrars can only take a domain when it was paid for fraudulently or is the subject of a “court order by a court of competent jurisdiction.” As already established, one of those doesn’t exist.

This means that domain owners who refuse a transferral of a domain to a new registrar will open themselves up to further action under ICANN’s Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy, a battle Jeftovic predicts they will lose.

“This is why it is never a good idea to just react to pressure in the face of obnoxious bluster – in the very act of trying to diffuse any perceived culpability you end up opening yourself to real liability,” the EasyDNS CEO concludes.

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