This round of seizures, the tenth carried out by the Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE unit, also targeted several sites that offered links to sporting events.

In total 16 domains were seized: firstrow.tv, xonesports.tv, firstrowsports.tv, firstrowsports.net, firstrowsports.com, hq-streams.tv, robplay.tv, soccertvlive.net, sports95.net, sports95.com, sports95.org, sportswwe.net, sportswwe.tv, sportswwe.com, youwwe.net and youwwe.com.

All of the sites were diverted to the familiar ICE ‘seized sites’ banner.

Not on all site admins the seizures had the desired affect. Within a day the FirstRowSports sites had switched to a new domain and were back in business. Speaking with TorrentFreak, the co-owner of FirstRow said that the sites would continue until a court – not the entertainment industries – deemed them illegal.

Interestingly, as reported this morning, the Rojadirecta domains seized by the U.S. authorities in an earlier copyright infringement sweep will now be returned after the U.S. decided they didn’t have the stomach for the kind of court battle described by FirstRow.

But for an admin behind some of the other seized domains listed above including hq-streams.tv and sports95.com, it is all too little too late.

Yonjo Quiroa of Comstock Park is the 28-year-old now-former owner of nine of the domains (not the Firstrow ones) seized in Operation Fake Sweep . ICE say that during January 2012 they were able to access unauthorized NBA, NHL and WWE streams via links on his websites.

Quiroa left a number of trails to his door, not least when he offered to sell some WWE-related domains to an undercover ICE agent posing as an employee of the WWE. On February 2 he was arrested by police in Michigan.

Known online as Ronaldo Solano, Quiroa has been held in custody without bail ever since, a total of almost seven months without trial. On August 1, 2012, Quiroa entered a guilty plea for a copyright misdemeanor on the understanding that he will receive a sentence of between 6 and 12 months.

“Mr. Quiroa has waived any rights to a presentence investigation and report,” writes Quiroa’s attorney in a letter filed in the docket this week and addressed to the judge handling the case.

On September 4 Quiroa will be sentenced, but even on release his punishment will continue.

“Mr. Quiroa will be removed from the United States following his service of his sentence in this case,” Quiroa’s attorney writes. “In light of these facts the guidelines do not recommend a term of supervised release [..]”

ICE claim that Quiroa was running a serious criminal enterprise set on turning a large profit, but from his entire operation which started in 2010 he made just $13,000.

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

One of the most prominent targets at the time was Rojadirecta, one of Spain’s most popular sites which describes itself as a major Internet sports broadcast index. The site links to free streams of many soccer events plus NBA, MLB, NFL, NPB and IPL matches.

While rights holders see Rojadirecta as an illegal thorn in their side, Spanish courts have already ruled otherwise. The site is owned by a Spanish company that pays its taxes and has been deemed to operate legally in Spain. Not once but twice.

However, that didn’t hold back the U.S. Government’s decision to seize the .com and .org domains of the company.

After the seizure Rojadirecta continued its operation as usual under .es and .me domains. However, it wasn’t planning on giving up the original domains that easily and fought back, in and out of court.

“We immediately initiated talks with the government, through our legal representatives in San Francisco and New York, in order to obtain the return of [our domains],” Rojadirecta’s owner explains now.

“Since it was impossible at that stage to recover domains amicably, we filed a complaint against the Government, the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of the United States of America.”

The result was a long court battle in which the U.S. had to show why it was allowed to keep the domain names. Now, after nearly 19 months, it appears that the U.S. authorities are not able to.

Yesterday, United States Attorney Preet Bahrara informed the judge that they are giving up the case.

“…in light of the particular circumstances of this litigation, the Government now seeks to dismiss its amended forfeiture complaint. The decision to seek dismissal of this case will best promote judicial economy and serve the interests of justice,” Bahrara writes.

The case has now been dismissed, meaning that Rojadirecta can welcome back its .com and .org domains. Rojadirecta’s owner says they swiftly informed all the responsible registries and the domains should be up and running again later today.

“Shortly after learning of the court order, we started proceedings with the organizations responsible for all .com and .org domain registrations (Verisign and PIR respectively) in order to restore the domains.”

“In the coming hours Rojadirecta will again be accessible from rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org, that is from the domains that never should have been censored,” he concludes.

This is not the first time the authorities have been forced to return a seized domain. Last year music blog Dajaz1 had its domain name returned after more than 12 months. It turned out that the seizure, initiated by the RIAA, was a mistake.

Thus far the “mistakes” have been without consequences for the U.S., but it’s clear that passing SOPA-like legislation where domains can be seized left and right will become harder and harder.

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

While most owners of affected domains have decided not to appeal the seizures, the Spanish owner of the Rojadirecta, one of Spain’s most popular sites, did.

Two months ago the company behind the site, Puerto 80, filed a petition in the Southern District of New York for the return of its domains. This call was later supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who together with Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge submitted an amicus brief in support of the Spanish company.

Yesterday, United States District Court Judge Paul Crotty decided to deny Puerto 80′s request, which means the domain will remain in the hands of the U.S. Government. The Judge argues that seizing Rojadirecta’s .com and .org domains does not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.

“Puerto 80’s First Amendment argument fails,” the Judge writes.

“Puerto 80 alleges that, in seizing the domain names, the Government has suppressed the content in the ‘forums’ on its websites, which may be accessed by clicking a link in the upper left of the home page. The main purpose of the Rojadirecta websites, however, is to catalog links to the copyrighted athletic events — any argument to the contrary is clearly disingenuous.”

The Judge further ruled that the claimed 32% decline in traffic and the subsequent harm to Puerto 80′s business is not an issue as visitors can still access the site through foreign domains. Puerto 80′s argument, that users may not be aware of these alternatives, was simply waived.

“Rojadirecta argues that, because ‘there is no way to communicate the availability of these alternative sites on the .org or .com domains . . . the vast majority of users will simply stop visiting the sites altogether.’ This argument is unfounded — Rojadirecta has a large internet presence and can simply distribute information about the seizure and its new domain names to its customers,” the Judge writes.

“In addition, Puerto 80 does not explain how it generates profit or argue that it is losing a significant amount of revenue as a result of the seizure. Specifically, Puerto 80 states that it does not generate revenue from the content to which it links, and it does not claim to generate revenue from advertising displayed while such content is playing,” Judge Crotty adds.

From the above the Judge concludes that the drop in visitor traffic due to their seizure does not establish a substantial hardship, and therefore no reason exists to return the domain.

This line of reasoning goes directly against previous rulings in First Amendment cases. As the EFF points out, in two earlier Supreme Court decisions it was concluded that having alternatives available does not mean that freedom of speech isn’t violated.

According to the EFF, the peculiarities of the ruling don’t end there.

“As if misapplying the relevant substantive First Amendment analysis wasn’t bad enough, the court failed to even address the fatal procedural First Amendment flaws inherent in the seizure process: namely, that a mere finding of ‘probable cause’ does not and cannot justify a prior restraint. How the court believes that the seizure satisfies the First Amendment in this regard is a mystery,” they write.

The decision of District Court Judge Paul Crotty to stand firmly behind the Government is worrying for all other websites who operate under U.S. controlled domains. It’s yet another step in granting the Government and copyright holders more control over the Internet, at the expense of smaller businesses and the rights of citizens.

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

Yesterday the company behind the site, Puerto 80, filed a petition in the Southern District of New York for the return of its domains. As reported by TechDirt, the company has brought in legal heavyweights in the form of Ragesh Tangri and Mark Lemley from law firm Durie Tangri.

The federal court filing by site owner Puerto 80 states that Rojadirecta’s domains were used for sports-related discussions, conceding that “an index of links to streams of sporting events” were available but adding that the site committed no acts of copyright infringement.

“Contrary to the grounds on which the domain names were seized, the Rojadirecta site is not violating copyright law, let alone criminal copyright law,” the filing begins.

“Rojadirecta explained this to the government when, on February 3, 2011, it sent ICE and the Department of Justice a letter requesting immediate return of the subject domain names pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 983(f).”

Puerto 80 go on to bemoan the fact that they repeatedly tried to engage the U.S. authorities in discussion about the seizures and that the process to reclaim their domain names had dragged on, a delay which continues to damage their business. Several weeks ago it became clear that legal action would be necessary.

“On May 26, 2011, the government informed counsel for Puerto 80 that the only acceptable ‘compromise’ would entail Puerto 80 prohibiting its users from linking to any U.S. content anywhere on its sites. Because this ‘solution’ would prohibit Puerto 80 from engaging in lawful acts not prohibited by copyright law, Puerto 80 chose instead to challenge the seizure in court,” notes the filing.

Puerto 80 say that the activities of Rojadirecta do not constitute contributory infringement because the site is capable of substantial non-infringing uses. Furthermore, the company refutes claims of vicarious liability adding that the actions of Rojadirecta do not constitute direct copyright either. Puerto 80 note that the government has failed to show that Rojadirecta committed even a single criminal act.

The lawsuit adds that the domain seizure by ICE effectively shut down the entire Rojadirecta website thereby stifling all speech hosted on it “based on an assertion that there was probable cause to believe that some of the material linked to the website (though not found on the website itself) might be infringing.”

The Rojadirecta website is still available online using an alternative URL – rojadirecta.es – but Peurto 80 said that losing its original domains cost it 30% of its traffic.

“We’re very glad that Rojadirecta is fighting back so that this and other domain name seizures can receive more careful judicial consideration,” said the EFF in a comment. “We’ll be following the case closely and expect to weigh in as amicus as well.”

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

Google’s search engine also gets thousands of these notices, where copyright holders ask the company to remove certain listings from its search results. Although time-consuming, the process usually works well. Sometimes, however, things can go horribly wrong.

This week Google decided to remove the homepage of the plagued sports streaming site Rojadirecta from its search index. The site already suffered its fair share of copyright troubles when the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized its .com domain early February, but apparently that didn’t mark the end of the misery.

As previously noted, Rojadirecta was an unusual target for a domain seizure because it’s owned by a Spanish company and has twice been declared legal by Spanish courts. Nevertheless, the domain was seized and Rojadirecta decided to continue doing business on the .es domain name they already had in place.

During the last few days that alternate domain was suddenly dragged into yet another copyright dispute. This time it involved Google and their decision to remove the domain from its search results.

Acting on a complaint from Major League Baseball (MLB), Google quickly removed listings for the site’s homepage. Although one can debate whether Rojadirecta – which only indexes links to streams hosted elsewhere – is infringing any copyrights, those who take a good look at the complaint will see that both MLB and Google made huge mistakes.

Firstly, the DMCA takedown notice was not directed at Google search, but at Google’s advertising platform Adsense. MLB didn’t ask for the Rojadirecta.es site to be removed from the search results at all, they simply wanted it to stop serving Google ads. And even if it was directed at Google search no listings should have been removed, since in their takedown notice MLB doesn’t point at a specific infringing location as a correctly formatted notice requires.

To make matters even worse, MLB also made a big mistake as Rojadirecta doesn’t even serve any Adsense ads. Apparently some people at MLB confused the external sites Rojadirecta links to in an iframe for the Rojadirecta site itself. The images that MLB sent with the takedown notice confirm this suspicion.

TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of Rojadirecta who was baffled by the actions of both Google and MLB. “From our experience it is clearly too easy to be removed from the search engine,” he told us in a comment.

Of course, this is not the first time that a mistake has lead to the removal of a website. In 2009, Google removed The Pirate Bay’s homepage from its search results by mistake, but this error was quickly corrected. Also, for Rojadirecta this is not the first erroneous removal either, something similar happened to the .com domain in 2007.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google responds to this error, if they do at all. Perhaps their employees should watch Google’s own “copyright school” video, perhaps they might learn a thing or two?

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.

The site has been operating since 2005, much to the dismay of various sports organizations who own the rights to the broadcasts. In 2007 this eventually led to legal action when Rojadirecta was reported for copyright infringement by sports rights holder Audiovisual Sport.

The company, a subsidiary of Spanish communications group PRISA (which owns Canal+, SportMania, various satellite channels, radio stations and newspapers), accused Rojadirecta of facilitating copyright infringement on various sports broadcasts by providing access to them via the Internet.

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 case of Audiovisual Sport against Rojadirecta went to court last year where the Madrid District Court agreed to provisionally dismiss the complaint of the copyright holder. The Court came to this decision after the claims made by Audiovisual Sport against the sports index were undermined by expert police evidence.

The Court further stated that Rojadirecta merely offered links to software and links that enabled users to watch the events. Even though the site carried advertising, no profits were made directly from any infringement. Previously, BitTorrent sites have been declared legal in Spain for similar reasons.

Audiovisual Sport was disappointed with the decision and filed for an appeal while Rojadirecta remained online. The appeal of the case has now been concluded. The Madrid Provincial Criminal Court sided with the earlier decision of the District Court and concluded that Rojadirecta is a legal operation.

This also concludes the legal proceedings as the case can no longer be appealed. TorrentFreak caught up with the admin of Rojadirecta who is obviously very happy with the outcome now the future of his site is secured.

“Of course we are in agreement with the verdict and with most of the legal reasoning. We neither host nor broadcast any audiovisual content, we are a sports streams index,” he told us.

“We were confident from the beginning and that is why we have never removed any links to sports events since we started our services in 2005. We have never given in to the continuous legal threats by companies from countries such as the US, UK, Mexico, Argentina, Portugal, Netherlands… not even with a criminal accusation.”

Many of the site’s users have responded with relief upon hearing the good news. They can now be certain that all major sporting events (including the upcoming FIFA Soccer World Cup) will still be available at Rojadirecta.

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

The company, a subsidiary of Spanish communications group PRISA (which owns Canal+, SportMania, various satellite channels, radio stations and newspapers), accused Rojadirecta of facilitating copyright infringement on various sports broadcasts by providing access to them via the Internet.

Rojadirecta is a site that indexes http links to sports streams that can already be found on the Internet, and also carries links to .torrent files. It doesn’t host anything at all, it just carries links. It doesn’t operate a tracker and doesn’t even host the .torrent files it links to.

The admin of Rojadirecta told TorrentFreak that they felt the case was brought to scare them into closing the site without due process.

“In 2007 we publshed a press release where we interpreted the report as an intimidating tactic with which we thought the company believed we would give in to the interests of Audiovisual Sport without the need for justice to be handed down,” he told us.

“We decided to ignore them, continue with what we considered to be a legal service
and wait for the court’s decision. So we expected that outcome but we knew it was going to take a lot of time because Spanish courts are totally overloaded with work for many years now. So finally two years later here is the outcome: case filled,” he added.

This week, District Court No.37 in Madrid agreed to provisionally dismiss the complaint against Rojadirecta, after the claims made by Audiovisual Sport against it were undermined by expert police evidence.

“Audiovisual Sport was basically saying that we provide software that allows our users to watch content that in Spain is broadcasted with a encrypted system – probably trying to use a law that was created to stop people using satellite TV decoders without paying,” Rojadirecta’s admin told TorrentFreak.

“That law refers to software and hardware created to decode those signals without paying. The police expert’s report explained that this is not what P2P TV software does. The expert explained that those events are broadcasted openly on International TV stations and that the use of those apps are free, open and universal and not created by us,” he added.

Dismissing the case, the court went on to say that Rojadirecta merely offered links to software and links that enabled users to watch the events. Even though the site carried advertising, no profits were made directly from any infringement.

“We knew that it was a matter of time, because time, and especially logic showed we were right,” Rojadirecta’s admin told us.

A defiant and fully legal Rojadirecta says that sports broadcasts via the Internet of the Spanish soccer league will continue to be linked to via the site, along with many other sporting events from around the world including Champions League, Premier League, Serie A, NBA, MLB, NFL, NPB, IPL etc.

“Of course they [AudioVisual Sport] can appeal but if the things were clear before, with the outcome of this decision they are even more clear, if that’s possible,” he concluded.

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