If you’ve been following the news about the US Department of Homeland Security’s domain seizing actions carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as part of their Operation In Our Sites initiative since mid-2010, you know that some domain owners have tried to find ways to fight because they believe their services to be perfectly legal. For some reason, however, the officials at the capitol who are pushing these actions don’t seem to realize that some of the domain owners feel wronged.
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) analyst Daniel Castro, one of the minds behind the COICA Web censorship bill, displayed that kind of ignorance in an interview with Ars Technica this week.
Castro was asked about the “seize-first-ask-questions-later approach” that congressional representative Zoe Lofgren has said could be a violation of domain owners’ rights under the US Constitution. To his credit, Castro did seem open to establishing a notification period prior to the domain takedowns to give owners an opportunity to respond if they believe they are wrongly accused. But, his assessment of the current situation with affected domain owners was puzzling.
“Remember, of all the sites that ICE has taken down so far, no one has come back and said, “I really wasn't an infringing site," with that one exception,” Castro told Ars reporter Nate Anderson, with the “exception” being the 84,000 domains mistakenly accused of harboring child pornography.
“If my site was taken down illegally by the federal government, I would complain very loudly,” Castro continued. “And we haven't heard that from the ones who were taken down. I think they know they were engaging in illegal activity, and some people have said they've stopped.”
Really, Mr. Castro? How about the following situations that have been reported on in plenty of news outlets, including here at MyCE:
- The owner of Torrent-Finder vowed to fight the US government for taking down his site which did not house any infringing material on its servers. They ditched the .COM in favor of a foreign domain.
- The owners of RapGodfathers.com believed their site was DMCA-compliant, but chose to rebuild their business outside of the US since waiting for government response would take several months.
- Kevin Hofman, owner of music blog OnMash.com, spoke with the New York Times to voice his frustrations with the government process. “I see myself as a legitimate source of content online, and I have no reason to believe that I was ever perceived as otherwise,” Hofman said.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. People are complaining, but it is falling on deaf ears. So they head to another country to conduct their business. That doesn’t sound like an effective solution to me.
“Sites that play by the rules are in no danger of being taken down because that's the whole point: they're part of the solution, not part of the problem,” Castro said.
The problem is that these “rules” Castro is referring to have not yet been created. Yes, we have laws that prohibit the infringement of copyrighted material, but we don’t have anything written that constitutes exactly what internet infringement is. It’s all a big grey area right now. How about we make the rules before we try to enforce them?
