Two weeks ago a group of U.S. senators proposed legislation to make it easier to crack down on so-called rogue websites, and today the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously approved the bill.

When the PROTECT IP Act becomes law the authorities can legitimately seize any domain name they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. All that’s required to do so is a preliminary order from the court. But that’s just the start, the bill in fact provides a broad range of censorship tools.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, the authorities can also order search engines to remove the website from its search results, order ISPs to block the website, and order ad-networks and payment processors to stop providing services to the website in question.

Backers of the bill argue that the PROTECT IP Act is needed as an extension of the already controversial domain seizures. As reported previously, it is now relatively easy for a seized website to continue operating under a new non-US based domain name.

Not everyone agrees with this stance. Yesterday several Internet giants including Google, Yahoo, eBay and American Express asked the Senate Committee not to adopt the bill, warning it would “undoubtedly inhibit innovation and economic growth.”

However, the concerns raised by the companies did not affect the vote today.

“Today the Judiciary Committee took an important step in protecting online intellectual property rights. The Internet is not a lawless free-for-all where anything goes,” commented Senator Orrin Hatch. “The Constitution protects both property and speech, both online and off.”

“The PROTECT IP Act targets the most egregious actors, and is an important first step to putting a stop to online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods,” Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said commenting on the importance of the bill.

“Both law enforcement and rights holders are currently limited in the remedies available to combat websites dedicated to offering infringing content and products. These rogue websites are often foreign-owned and operated, or reside at domain names that are not registered through a U.S.-based registry or registrar,” Leahy added.

Similar comments were made by the other Committee members and the various entertainment industry lobby groups.

For Hollywood and the major record labels the PROTECT IP Act is the legislation they have dreamed of for a long time. It allows for copyright holders to obtain a court orders to seize a domain, or prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement. All without due process.

The PROTECT IP Act will now move on to the Senate where it’s expected to be opposed by Senator Ron Wyden, who also stopped the bill’s predecessor COICA, fearing it would stifle free speech. Whether it will be enough to prevent the legislation from becoming law has yet to be seen.

Update: Senator Wyden placed a hold on the PROTECT IP Act and released the following statement.

“Consistent with Senate Standing Orders and my policy of publishing in the Congressional Record a statement whenever I place a hold on legislation, I am announcing my intention to object to any unanimous consent request to proceed to S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act.

“In December of last year I placed a hold on similar legislation, commonly called COICA, because I felt the costs of the legislation far outweighed the benefits. After careful analysis of the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, I am compelled to draw the same conclusion. I understand and agree with the goal of the legislation, to protect intellectual property and combat commerce in counterfeit goods, but I am not willing to muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth to achieve this objective. At the expense of legitimate commerce, PIPA’s prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

“The Internet represents the shipping lane of the 21st century. It is increasingly in America’s economic interest to ensure that the Internet is a viable means for American innovation, commerce, and the advancement of our ideals that empower people all around the world. By ceding control of the Internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the Internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives. Until the many issues that I and others have raised with this legislation are addressed, I will object to a unanimous consent request to proceed to the legislation.”

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

A few dozen sites have registered alternative domains, including the semi-private tracker Demonoid who already moved away from their .com domain earlier today.

Other torrent site operators have also bought additional backup domains, TorrentFreak has learned. To emphasize the irony of the situation, Chinese domains seem to be favored, but mosts sites have more than a few. One of the torrent site owners who already had a .hk backup domain is isoHunt’s Gary Fung.

Fung, who’s based in Canada where he runs his company, has been fighting the movie industry in US courts for nearly 5 years. Currently, he is appealing a ruling which forced isoHunt to implement a filter of film related keywords for US visitors.

Although this keyword filter was ordered through the normal legal channels, the US authorities have recently stretched the boundaries of commercial censorship. The owner of Torrent-Finder lost control over his .com domain a few days ago, without being informed and without any opportunity to defend himself.

With the COICA bill, this type of censorship is expected to only increase, and isoHunt’s Gary Fung points out to TorrentFreak that this is a worrying situation.

“Countries like China censor for political reason, US with COICA will censor for copyright and commercial reason. It’ll be a chilling parallel put into serious question how the US should still be in charge of the much of the internet infrastructure like the root DNS, or how US can continue to claim as the model example for free-speaking democracy.”

Where China’s censorship is mostly fed by the Government’s concerns, in the US it’s the copyright holders who fuel the fire. Interestingly, the authorities are quite open about the fact that last weekend’s seizures were a direct response to complaints from private companies.

“In general, what we can say is, there are specific complaints from rights holders that these sites were infringing on copyrights,” Erik Barnett of Homeland Security’s ICE said in response to the seizures.

And then there’s Google of course. The search engine that pulled out of China over censorship concerns, announced just a few hours ago that it will censor auto completion on ‘piracy’ related searches worldwide. Apparently censorship is not that bad in some cases.

“We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose,” Google writes.

This probably means that “thep” will no longer suggest “thepiratebay” and that the word “torrent” won’t be added to movie or music related searches anymore. Yes, that’s yet another successful lobby effort from the entertainment industry, and just a small step from banning ‘rogue’ sites from the search results altogether.

Earlier, the RIAA and MPAA handed in their wish lists for the COICA censorship bill, if it should pass. Judging from the comments from Homeland Security, this means that sites such as The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, RapidShare and MegaUpload may be next, as they were labeled as rogue websites by the movie and music industry representatives.

isoHunt’s Gary Fung was not impressed to see his site included on both lists though.

“For RIAA, MPAA’s slandering of us as rogue websites, it’s political PR and lobbying that has no basis in reality and ignorable. Perhaps they should be educated in the many non-infringing uses of BitTorrent and P2P, or they risk listing every social media and sharing website as rogue,” Fung told us.

The question is whether this lobbying will indeed be ineffective. Recent history offers little reassurance. It only takes a single seizure warning to take a site down, infringing or not. But then again, there’s always China where torrent sites like isoHunt can flee to if needed.

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.

Before it becomes law the bill will have to be approved by the Senate and Congress, which has to happen quickly because a new Congress will be seated in January.

If signed into law, the ‘Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act’ (COICA) would allow the Department of Justice to file a civil lawsuit against the domain owners. If the courts then decide that a site is indeed promoting copyright infringement, the DOJ can order the domain registrar to take the domain offline. The bill is not limited to domestics offenders, but also allows the DOJ to target foreign domain owners.

The targets of the bill could possibly include many BitTorrent sites. Last week both the MPAA and RIAA submitted their wishlists of “rogue websites” that should be taken care of, and these included The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Demonoid and other popular torrent sites.

Although none of the operators of these sites will be happy with the new legislation, Demonoid has been opposing COICA in public, asking its members to take action.

“If passed, this law will allow the government, under the command of the media companies, to censor the internet as they see fit, like China and Iran do, with the difference that the sites they decide to censor will be completely removed from the internet and not just in the US,” a message on the Demonoid homepage reads.

Aside from classic ‘pirate’ websites, the bill also conveniently provides an effective backdoor to take the whistleblower site Wikileaks offline, or its domain at least. After all, Wikileaks has posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States.

If the bill 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).

Over the last weeks, several digital rights groups including the EFF have voiced their concerns over the new legislation, calling it an “unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech and a threat to innovation” and claiming it “would break the Internet.”

The protests and opposition are expected to continue during the next weeks, but meanwhile the RIAA and MPAA are applauding the Government’s actions.

Update: Demand Progress just sent out an email that gives hope to those who want COICA to be stopped or changed.

Senator Ron Wyden denounced the bill as “a bunker-buster cluster bomb” aimed at the Internet and pledged to “do everything I can to take the necessary steps to stop it from passing the U.S. Senate.” In addition Hollywood’s Dianne Feinstein told the committee that even she was uncomfortable with the Internet censorship portion of the bill and hoped it could be removed when they take it up again next year.

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