As long as a government agent – often with the help of a rightsholder – can convince a judge of wrongdoing, it’s game on.

Up until last month all the scare stories concerned U.S. domains, but then Homeland Security’s ICE unit announced Project Transatlantic which targeted top-level domains such as .eu, .be, .dk, .fr, .ro and .uk.

Then last Friday we learned that the .EU domains of torrent sites Torrentz, Fenopy and RealTorrentz, DDL linking sites Sceper.eu and Downextra.eu, plus streaming links sites WatchSeries.eu and ChannelCut.eu, had all been put “on hold” by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names, pending legal action.

There has been no official EURid announcement and the domain registry has not responded to our request for comment. However, we have discovered that EURid is also refusing to supply the official documentation that effectively authorized the “on holds” to representatives of the sites in question.

Nevertheless, what we have learned during the past 24 hours is certainly of great interest. According to a source familiar with the situation, EURid put the domains on hold after a complaint against the sites was filed with the prosecutor at the heart of the EU in Brussels.

Only adding to the mystery, EURid are refusing to say who filed the complaints or what they contain. Although that information might prove difficult to keep quiet for long, it’s still a concern that even the owners of the affected domains are currently being kept in the dark.

After all, these things can go wrong when site operators are excluded from proceedings.

The U.S. seizure of the Dajaz1 hip-hop blog domain had to be reversed when it was found to have been wrongfully taken, as did the domain of streaming links site Rojadirecta. Furthermore, doubt over the legitimacy of the evidence used to justify the Megaupload domain seizures was also raised recently.

In the meantime, life for the sites with .EU domains continues, with many taking precautions should things turn out for the worst.

Fenopy has switched from .EU to .SE and RealTorrentz has switched back to .COM. DDL links site Sceper has dumped .EU and migrated to .WS and DownExtra is now operating from ShareNewz.com. WatchSeries.eu is now accessible from a .LI domain and ChannelCut, like Demonoid before it, appears to consider a .ME domain a safer option.

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

Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.

“Recognizing the global nature of Internet crime, this year the IPR Center partnered with Europol, who, through its member countries, executed coordinated seizures of foreign-based top-level domains such as .eu, .be, .dk, .fr, .ro and .uk. This effort is titled Project Transatlantic and resulted in 31 domain name seizures,” ICE announced.

Prompted by this new development, TorrentFreak spoke with the owners of several BitTorrent sites to get their opinion on what this might mean for their sites. The general feeling was that ICE might be sending a message that no TLD is safe, even those in Europe.

But despite the concern, what we didn’t expect was any immediate action to seize domains. However, although not concrete, activity involving several top BitTorrent and other file-sharing related .EU domains in the past 24 hours has given cause for concern.

Yesterday afternoon the statuses of Torrentz.eu, Fenopy.eu and BTscene.eu were all forcibly changed by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. Rather than being simply marked as “registered”, the domains were flagged as “on hold”.

“This domain name has been registered and is on hold. It is active but may not be traded or transferred pending the outcome of legal activity,” EURid’s notes explain. The domains are not seized or taken offline, but the owners are unable to make any changes while they are on hold.

Similar status changes we also applied to several other related domains including DDL linking sites Sceper.eu and Downextra.eu, torrent site RealTorrentz.eu, and streaming links sites WatchSeries.eu and ChannelCut.eu.

The changes all took place within the space of a few minutes, starting at 16:31 and ending at 16:35 Friday afternoon. Other domains may have been affected but so far those listed above are the only ones we were able to find.

No other information has been provided by EURid so at the present moment it is not possible to state the exact reasons for the status changes. We do not know for certain if the action is file-sharing related or connected to some other issue.

However, all of the sites listed above appear in the first few pages of Google’s Transparency Report, meaning that they are connected to a relatively high number of takedown requests. Only three .EU domains in the early pages of Google’s report have not had their statuses changed by EURiD.

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