US Government Seizes Domains

In a new battle against piracy, the US government has taken upon itself to seize domains that list any links to files on other servers that may contain copyrighted material. I am starting to feel that the “public” networks aren’t so public anymore. The Internet never left the governments hands, did it? Sites that were seized were replaced with the following image:

I am not for piracy at all, but I am more against government censorship. If they were a bit more knowledgeable in how torrents worked, and how search engines worked, this wouldn’t have happened. Guess what? I can search and download copyrighted materials using Google. Is that going to be shut down next? Who knows. Obama will have his way, as he and his administration have already proven to be more knowledgeable than anyone else in the IT industry…

While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say “that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit more difficult.

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.