Homeland Security Finally Admits To Latest Domain Seizures; Arrests Guy For Selling Unauthorized 'Sons Of Anarchy' T-Shirts
from the feeling-safer? dept
A few weeks back, we wrote about a bunch of new domain seizures by Homeland Security's ICE division, and wondered why ICE hadn't said anything publicly about them. Well, it's finally put out an announcement about these domain seizures, including the fact that it had the operator of one site arrested for selling counterfeit Sons of Anarchy apparel. That guy, Ryan Breen, now faces 10 years in jail and fines up to $2 million. It seems there's a fair bit of irony in the fact that DHS/ICE is so thrilled about busting a guy selling apparel for a TV show that plays up an outlaw motorcycle gang known for its illegal weapons trafficking. Let's celebrate the gun runners... and punish the guy who made some t-shirts with 10 years in jail, huh? I have to admit that I'd much rather see Homeland Security and ICE actually focus on protecting the country, rather than some guy in upstate NY selling some t-shirts to fans of a TV show. And, of course, once again, it appears that most of the domains seized were taken without any notice, without any opportunity for the domain holders to respond. ICE has made it abundantly clear that they don't care about due process or the First Amendment in seizing domains, and frankly I find that a lot more troubling than some guy selling t-shirts online.
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Filed Under: counterfeiting, domain seizures, homeland security, ice, trademark
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The British have seized that too.
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Dom dom dom dom domdom dom domdom. Dom dom dom dom domdom dom domdom.
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Was rupert Murdoch visiting the Queen?
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Their solution? Play the imperial march. The visiting dignitary had no idea and just thought they were honouring him, while everyone else in England giggled.
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You have infringed on Futurama's proprietary trademark statement.
Please stay tuned to this channel for a message from HypnoToad
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Wasn't that from The Simpsons?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Homer#Reception
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You really believed that? Really?
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:P
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AMERICANS and Brits wake up smell the coffee you have nothing to lose you have no freedoms left!!!!
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A man that has proposed COICA along with Protect IP "for the good of American ingenuity"...
A man that has said that infringement is theft without any worry of either one...
A person promoting Grateful Dead as his favorite band, but seems to be woefully against the EFF (where the president was a member of the band!)...
There's someone that is as evil as Palpatine. His name starts with the same letter.
Patrick Leahy.
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He's not a senator anymore, but my vote would be for Joe Biden.
This is a man with possibly the worst record of privacy abuses of any Senator, and certainly the worst record regarding tech issues. His advocacy of wiretapping was so great, that legislation he authored spurred Phil Zimmerman to create PGP, and led to the creation of the CDT. Details here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
(It should be noted that Zimmerman is a democrat... as am I, for non-tech issues.)
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He at least knows how to hold the book rightside up
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Response to: TDR on Jul 28th, 2011 @ 7:18pm
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Bets on when they start going after political sites
Any bets on when ICE takes down their first political site?
I don't think they'll go that far for at least a year. It'll take 'em awhile to get the public and the judges used to the seizures. Then, after there's no more controversy, the goons will start pushing the boundaries.
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"It is estimated that intellectual property theft costs American industry billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs every year."
Anybody can make an estimate. Doesn't mean shit.
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"It is estimated that intellectual property theft costs American industry billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs every year."
Anybody can make an estimate. Doesn't mean shit. [citation needed]
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It is also estimated that DHS has the largest number of sexual assailants and child molesters of any organization in the US.
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Security? pffft
...and yet:
In 2009, the US Department of Homeland Security released an important report on the threat of right-wing extremism. The report would later be "withdrawn by the department after criticism from conservatives" and, according to the author of the report, who not surprisingly no longer works at DHS, "the number of analysts assigned to non-Islamic militancy of all kinds was reduced to two from six."
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/2011726861255428.html
How many people do you think they have on non-violent offences like copyright and trademark infringement?
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It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
Standard disclaimer: NO, I'm not FOR draconian sentences.
But when enforcement -- not necessarily the law -- is so increasingly draconian, nattering about the fine points of what copyright was in last century's civil society is useless. You now live in a police state where there are no laws, only power.
It's time to start focusing on those who drive the increase of police state because benefit from it: The Rich. And another standard disclaimer: you are not among The Rich, won't at all be harmed by taxing the hell out of them, in fact your life will be improved. Limiting the money that tyrants get is the only way societies ever gain or maintain freedom.
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
�By the time you wake up and realize you're living in a totalitarian state, it's already too late.�
������������attributed to Hannah Arendt, but probably somewhat misquoted
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Re: Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
at what? making theirselves looks like a bunch of manically stubborn, culture-hoarding control-freak money fetishists hitching an ego-trip on the Hindenburg to self-destruction?
you're absolutely right! i don't think there is a single soul on this earth who would disagree you're utterly destroying us in that department, it must take hard work to get that completely severed from reality
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...... I believe in just laws stop
...... Lawmakers are now purchased stop
...... Mass media is owned stop
...... Frenzies are fabricated to establish new law stop
...... Money stop
...... The rich are winning stop
...... The fight never happened stop
or something like that I think.
ess-ka-pay - escape
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
Again your obvious reading comprehension troubles. The copyright maximalists are getting laws changed in their favor, however they are not making people buy their products nor stopping piracy. Try to keep up.
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
The rich will always have their freedom and liberty, they can buy it.
True tyrants can only be limited by the nose.
Taxing the rich only empowers the tyranny of government.
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Re: Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
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Re: Re: Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
1. Eliminate most government departments, regulations, AND all the private corporate subsidies that go with it. Why eliminate regulations? Because when you implement everything I list below, failure is a much stronger regulator. Government regulations are mostly knee-jerk reactions to something that has already happened, and they do not address poor practices that they haven't thought of yet. They are also full of loopholes for the companies the government likes. Market regulations occur naturally, and they punish highly risky practices regardless of what form they take.
2. Allow companies to fail, regardless of their size.
3. Eliminate the Federal Reserve so that everyone has to compete for resources equally. The fact the the Fed can arbitrarily pick and choose who gets the cheap (0.25%) credit is a travesty.
4. Eliminate the CIA, Homeland Security, ATF, and all other unconstitutional government enforcement departments.
5. Amend the Constitution to close the loopholes that have allowed the massive expansion (as best we can, anyway).
Pie in the sky? Yeah, probably. But if you want liberty, this is the only way it will happen and stick around for more than a couple years.
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Re: Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
At this point, taxation is not really worth discussing. The real power of government comes from their ability to transfer purchasing power away from the citizens to themselves through a process they call "quantitative easing." Anyone who believes "stimulus" exists to help poor people get jobs is a laughable fool. It exists to steal the purchasing power from the dollars they allow you to keep.
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
By this, I assume you're talking abuot the Govt and big business, right?
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
If that's intentional, then kudos to you.
The point, is that there are no technological or legal means to put the genie back in the bottle. You can as those in favour of strong copyright do, get more and more legislation passed, spend more and more on DRM, spend more and more on court cases and achieve nothing more than chopping one head of the hydra and making the perceived problem worse.
Or you can relax about it, change business models to maximise it's benefit to you and reap the rewards.
This site is about where people are going wrong and in what ways they are going wrong in coping with the simple fact that non physical digital files are infinite in supply.
The references to the original intentions of copyright are to show some wrongheaded people what the purpose of copyright actually is rather than the benefit train that it is for only the tiniest handful of creators, a train that, to extend the metaphor, the publishers hijacked quite some time ago and they not the creators are the primary beneficiaries of.
In their tantruming about the realities of the information age, they are not only wasting a lot of time and resources (all finite) but wasting a lot of government time and resources (also finite) and our time and resources (also finite)
Everyone will be better off, when they finally grow up and take a mature view on things, but as with many a tantruming toddler, to switch metaphor again, people are going to have to keep, alternately ignoring them and occasionally putting them on the naughty step until they calm down and start behaving like big boys and girls.
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Re: Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
They don't want to. What they want is to ratchet up copyright laws and create a whole "war" on copyright infringement that will eventually exceed the "war" on drugs and make lots of money for them. The taxpayers will even get to pay for it (when they aren't in prison).
Or you can relax about it, change business models to maximise it's benefit to you and reap the rewards.
I just described their changing "business model".
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Re: It's no longer safe to push at the bounds of copyright.
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Goodbye USA
The space program is dead.
Corporations are running the government.
Housing bubble
High unemployment
Further transfer of manufacturing jobs overseas
Primary growth sector is copyright litigation.
the government breaking its own laws, spying on its own citizens.
Goodbye USA. You had a good run of it, but the party's over.
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Re: Goodbye USA
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FTFY
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FTFY
No, it's the majority who keep voting the same way.
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Re: Goodbye USA
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> to care not a whit about anything anymore,
> then they deserve their fate.
I disagree.
Everyone seems to care. Everyone is loudly complaining about how things are.
People just feel powerless to do anything. They perceive, and correctly I believe, that their vote doesn't really matter.
The cleverness of our two party system is that it keeps the population approximately evenly split. The parties fight over diametrically opposite polar extremes. The Vorlons vs. the Shadows. The genius of it is that on any given issue, one party, seemingly almost chosen at random, is on the "correct" side of the issue. By "correct" I mean that on some issues it is easy to sympathize with the arguments on both sides of the issue -- but the issue merely is used by the two parties to divide the voters -- and most importantly, to keep them riled up.
Now just waiting for president Clark to dissolve congress by executive order. It will make things so much simpler.
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Re: Re: Re: Goodbye USA
Hah! No, they fight over minutia, over the inconsequential and arbitrary differences that those in power hold up as the pet issues. Little do most people know that, as they are fighting over insignificant right-left differences, both parties are racing at top speed toward a single point: the Authoritarian south pole. There is more than one axis in the political spectrum, and the recognition of the libertarian-authoritarian axis is much more important to our liberty and way of life. Unfortunately, most people are so wrapped up in the right-left squabbling that they don't even notice how authoritarian we have become. Rather than fighting over whose way of life we want the government to enforce, how about we just gut the government's power and allow people to have their freedom back?
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Re: Re: Re: Goodbye USA
Unfortunately, the comments here on Techdirt don't seem to reflect the general population. For the most part, the general population is more interested in supporting the "winning team", i.e. party, than anything else. It's the "sports" mentality at work.
They perceive, and correctly I believe, that their vote doesn't really matter.
It doesn't when they act like sports fans and just vote for their "team".
The cleverness of our two party system is that it keeps the population approximately evenly split.
That's the way team sports are usually played: 2 teams. It keeps the fans from having to think about too much at once.
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Re: Goodbye USA
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I was just pointing out one more thing people are (IMO legitimately) complaining about.
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A question
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great show
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Did they contact the t-shirt seller? I'd bet that they just need to contact the seller and offer a contract in which they share the profits, you know... licensing. Unless the seller is unreasonable, the whole deal could be done in less than a week.
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You know, that is exactly what the Grateful Dead did when fans wanted to sell merchandise at shows. They made it easy for them to become authorized dealers. They didn't want to fight with there fans, they tried to work something out that was beneficial to all. Of course this won't work here, they were not greedy power hungry hypocrites.
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eBay
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Most? Does it mean that some had a chance to defend? That would be a news to me.
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At the very least it does not appear that ICE has seized any new URLs since last week. Any time it does, it changes the domain to point to seizedservers.com and you can check any changes here:
http://www.dailychanges.com/seizedservers.com/
So you can tell whenever ICE seizes new domains. The last seizures were July 23rd.
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Are the sites offline, or are their domain names merely redirected?
The sites may still be up and running perfectly if you know the IP address.
I'm not condoning piracy, merely pointing out the fact. Of course, that alone may be a criminal act, like linking.
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On our sweeps of the parking lot before and during the show, if we spotted anyone else selling t-shirts or other merch we were to grab a couple of security guys and confiscate their stuff. If they didn't put up too much fuss we didn't need to bother calling the police. Then we sold their shirts at our stall if they were decent quality.
Remember this is a legit business working 10,000+ capacity shows and their policy is to steal and profit from illegal merch.
So anyway: 10yrs in jail seems a little excessive to me.
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What
What is next, life sentence for crossing the street in the wrong place?
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Laugh, all you want.
Fascists will eventually impose the death penalty. First on seemingly big things, like subversive and dangerous political ideas or writings that threaten our very national security.
Since losses to "piracy" are so gigantically huge ($74 Trillion just from one program!) capital punishment will seem appropriate. After all, the losses to the economy caused by lime wire alone could have paid off the national debt about five times over, made us all rich and living like kings.
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"We kill people who kill people because killing people is wrong."
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Re: What
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I feel safer already
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They're not celebrating gun runners, Mike. They're protecting people's rights from being violated. Funny how you don't support this.
ICE has made it abundantly clear that they don't care about due process or the First Amendment in seizing domains, and frankly I find that a lot more troubling than some guy selling t-shirts online.
Sigh. Of course you support the pirates, Mike. Of course you do.
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I suppose you think that murderers shouldn't have defence attorneys or fair trials. "If they were innocent, they wouldn't have been charged, now would they?"
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New "due process": Guilty until proven innocent.
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A guy is selling crack out of his car. The police stop him, they seize the drugs (horrors!) and impound the car (goodbye fourth amendment) and then take him to jail (oh no, due process is dead!).
You guys are just to frigging funny to be believed.
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Copyright infringement is not on par with the sale of illicit drugs - Duh!
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Probable cause was demonstrated to a judge who then issued a seizure warrant. That's due process. That's how it's worked for over two centuries. That's got nothing to do with innocent until proven guilty. If there's probable cause that you committed a crime, you get arrested. You're still presumed innocent.
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Agreed. However, there seems to be a general dislike for the hassle of actually getting the warrant prior to the "processing".
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Drama Queen!
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Drama Queen!
Drama Queen? Then what do you call Masnick with his hysterical half-truths, paranoid conspiracy theories and wild conclusions? He's a blathering, tinfoil hat wearing, nutjob.
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Why do you continually refer to yourself as "Masnick" whilst looking into a mirror?
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