With their domain names no longer under their control rendering most existing search engine links unusable, most of the sites all but disappeared. Some, however, refused to give in and moved immediately to new domain names.

One of those is the BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, which relocated to a .info domain it already owned. Just after the seizures, TorrentFreak asked site owner Waleed Gadelkareem how the action had affected his traffic. The response was clear – the domain seizure had set the site’s traffic back massively.

Like many other torrent sites Google was the main traffic source of Torrent-Finder, so even with the .info domain ready traffic initially plunged up to 90%. Google was simply sending the traffic to the seized .com domain, not the new one.

But for this determined Egyptian, patience, hard work and a little help from Google was to set the site back on track to recovery. At the same time, Waleed shows how futile the U.S. seizures are for sites that are determined to continue their operations.

“Google webmaster tools are very important for any website’s SEO and I had already registered torrent-finder.com on my cpanel and confirmed ownership,” Waleed explained.

This registration meant that using the “Change of Address” option on the panel could be done immediately.

“Then I had to direct all linkbacks to the new .info domain by contacting webmasters or changing it by myself if I could. You can see the result on Google analytics of search engine traffic,” says Waleed. (see below)

“Slowly Torrent Finder is getting back most of the indexed pages that we used to have on Google, and of course the targeted keywords,” adds Waleed.

Despite the encouraging signs of recovery with the .info domain (thanks to Google), Waleed is also continuing with his legal action to reclaim his .com domain with the help of lawyer David Snead.

Waleed hopes that the mistakes that were made will serve him well in his case.

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.

The site, which doesn’t host or link to any infringing content, disappeared from the Internet for allegedly infringing copyrights. It was the oddball in a list of dozens of sites that were selling counterfeit goods including fake watches and sports clothing.

Up until that day the owner of Torrent-Finder had never run into legal issues when operating his site, which he founded more than half a decade ago. Waleed – who runs the site from his home country of Egypt – always felt he was running a perfectly legal operation and openly registered the domain in his own name.

Needless to say it came as a shock to him that his domain had been taken over by the U.S. authorities last month, a decision he is now determined to fight fiercely. Waleed has hired a lawyer to assist him in this process, and the first steps have been set into motion to hopefully regain control over the domain.

TorrentFreak got in touch with David Snead, the lawyer who represents Torrent-Finder, to ask him about this peculiar case.

“At base, what ICE did is legal, if, in torrent-finder.com’s case, a stretch of the law, which is likely what they intended,” Snead told TorrentFreak.

“There is a civil forfeiture law that has been used for many years by the U.S. to enforce its customs laws, and it has been widely, and legally, used to seize items that infringe copyrights. The classic case would be for customs to seize counterfeit DVDs sold at a flea market.”

“In this case, we believe that ICE’s activities are based on a provision of the statute that allows seizure of items that are facilitating infringement. Because the DNS resided in the U.S., ICE was likely within the law in seizing the DNS, even though the owner of the domain name is not in the U.S. It’s important to note that the site itself wasn’t seized, only the domain name,” Snead added.

It has to be added that Snead and everyone else are still mostly in the dark about the exact reason why the Torrent-Finder domain was seized. “We really don’t know what happened here. So the legal analysis is based on ICE’s past activity enforcing U.S. customs laws,” the lawyer told TorrentFreak.

Thus far, ICE has been contacted with a request for more details about the seizure order that was filed under seal. But, despite promises that more information would be provided before last Friday, both Snead and Torrent-Finder are still waiting to receive a copy of the order.

In the coming days (or weeks) we hope to find out more about the allegations against the BitTorrent search engine, which will enable Waleed and his lawyer to determine what steps to take next. In the meantime Torrent-Finder is still available under their backup domain, Torrent-Finder.info.

As far as we are aware, the owner of Torrent-Finder is the only person protesting the seizure of his domain. Waleed sincerely believes that his site isn’t breaking any laws and hopes that the United States legal system will side with him in the end. .

“I am sure I will win the case. Any internet user who used Torrent Finder before and understands how it works will know that I am not doing anything different than any other search engine. Besides, the silence of the ICE and keeping the investigation ‘under seal’ can only mean that they have done something wrong,” Waleed told TorrentFreak.

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

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield – unless you’re ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is.

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain.

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it searches are clearly visible in the results shown.

Yesterday we reported that the domain of hiphop site RapGodFathers had been seized and today we can reveal that they are not on their own. Two other music sites in the same field – OnSmash.com and DaJaz1.com – have fallen to the same fate. But ICE activities don’t end there.

Several other domains also appear to have been seized including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com, throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com, handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com.

All seized sites point to the same message.

Domain seizures coming under the much debated ‘censorship bill’ COICA? Who needs it?

Update: Below is an longer list of domains that were apparently seized. Most of the sites relate to counterfeit goods. We assume that the authorities had a proper warrant for these sites (as they had for RapGodFathers yesterday), but were unable to confirm this.

Update: A spokeswoman for ICE confirmed the seizures in the following statement. “ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names. As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time.”

Update: The authorities have revealed further details on “Cyber Monday Crackdown.”

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