Sen. Joe Lieberman Asks Google For A 'Report Blog As Terrorist' Button

from the clicking-our-way-to-a-safe-and-secure-nation dept

Senator Joe Lieberman, taking a break from his usual schedule of trying to stamp out all things Wikileaks-related, returns to his old anti-terrorism stomping grounds, sending out a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, expressing his concern that not enough stuff is getting labeled "terrorism."

He bases his request on the old "because someone did something once" argument that has served the DHS and TSA so well. (See also: "See something. Say something." because that one time a guy reported a vehicle with a bomb. See also: please remove your shoes and step into the Pornoscan because one time that guy tried to light his shoes on fire and that other time a guy had bomb-laced underwear.) Recent "lone wolf" terrorism suspect Jose Pimentel was, like so many other people in the world, a blogger. Lieberman apparently believes that the prevention of future acts of terrorism should be turned over to the blogosphere in the form of an option to "flag" a blog as containing "terrorist" content.

Talking Points Memo has more info:

"Pimentel's Internet activity - both his spreading of bomb-making instructions links and his hate-filled writings - were hosted by Google," Lieberman wrote.

"On his site www.trueislam1.com, Pimentel stated, 'People have to understand that America and its allies are legitimate targets in warfare. This includes facilities such as army bases, police stations, political facilities, embassies, CIA and FBI buildings, private and public airports, and all kinds of buildings where money is being made to help fund the war.' As demonstrated by this recent case, Google's webhosting site, Blogger is being used by violent Islamist extremists to broadcast terrorist content," Lieberman continued.

Lieberman also points out that Youtube already has this option (thanks to Liberman's tireless complaining), so it would logically follow that Blogger enforce the same limitations. In fact, he pretty much states that the same people that can prevent forest fires can also prevent terrorism (i.e. "You," meaning "all of us"), only in this case it can be done with a simple click of the mouse.

"The private sector plays an important role in protecting our homeland from the preeminent threat of violent Islamist extremism, and Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter Islamic extremism online."

Oh, wait. We can't actually stop terrorism. We can only flag "Islamist extremism," which for some people could mean the site quotes the Koran. For others, all it might take is a few angry words delivered by certain foreign types. And for others, all they need is the urge to start pushing buttons.

This is another attempt by a politician to shove the culpability for terrorist acts onto the shoulders of hosting platforms. By all means, Google could add a "Report as TERROR" button to its blogging platform, but does anyone not named Lieberman actually believe that this will ever prevent a future act of terrorism? I'd rather potential terrorists bogged themselves down in the minutia of blogging (endlessly checking stats, rescuing legitimate comments from the spam container, arguing with pesky commenters, following incoming links back into malware deathtraps, gaming their Technorati rating, etc.) than actually, you know, doing terrorist stuff.

There's also the fact that "flagging something as something" has got to be the most ineffective deterrent ever devised, whether you're trying to stomp out spam or to do something more difficult, like save the world from "Islamist extremism." Not only will whoever's policing this new banhammer have to deal with a new set of false positives, this also puts Google in the awkward position of trying to decide if the blogs reported are actually harmful or just some random person spouting a bunch of untargeted nonsense.

And if Google does decide to start doing this, odds are that there will be a bunch of racially-motivated clicking going on, which will only add to the "noise" side of the signal-to-noise ratio. Once you start shutting down a particular religion based on clicks -- all because the federal government demanded it -- you're asking for all sorts of trouble in the First Amendment arena. Uglier than this is the fact that asking for a "Report" button is yet another punt by those in charge of keeping this country safe. The implicit statement seems to be "We can't figure out how to stop terrorists so we're leaving that to you," which would make this no different from every previous foiled terrorist attack. It's not the DHS, TSA or air marshals that stop terrorists. When they're not being foiled by their own incompetence, they're being taken down by fellow passengers. A plea for a "Report as Terrorism" button has all the hallmarks of another windmill tilt in the hopes of appearing to be doing "something."

Filed Under: blogs, joe lieberman, terrorism
Companies: google

If At First You Fail In Suing A Blogger For Defamation Over His Description Of You Shooting Two Dogs, Try, Try Again

from the double-jeopardy dept

I have to admit that I was pretty sure I've written about this case before, but in searching through the archives, I can't find it. So, here's the quick summary of Comins v. VanVoorhis. Christopher Comins, a wealthy Florida businessman, found out about some dogs running around some cows in a field owned by a business associate. Comins, apparently believing the dogs were wolves, went to the field (with permission of the owner) with some guns and shot the two dogs over and over again. Originally, he claimed self-defense, but after the following video appeared on YouTube showing the whole incident, that story didn't quite hold: The story made the national press. It was also picked up on many blogs, including this blog post by University of Florida student Matthew Frederick VanVoorhis. VanVoorhis' description of the events is certainly "almost novelistic," as the CitMedia link above suggests. As such it does assume a few things, such as emotions, and may not be perfectly accurate in the timeline. But does it rise to the level of defamation? That seems extraordinarily unlikely, at best, but Comins chose to sue him for defamation. Seeing as the story was covered widely by the media, and there's a video of the events in question, you might think that it's a bit strange to sue a random blogger who very few people read. Perhaps he really is "the easiest target," as some suggest. If anything, it had all the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit, especially since VanVoorhis' post also questioned Cumin's connections to politically powerful figures, and how that might impact any lawsuit concerning the shootings.

Either way, despite the video, Comins ended up being acquitted of the shooting, with the judge claiming that shooting a couple dogs at extremely close range was not torturing an animal. As the link in this paragraph notes, it seems like that's the kind of question a jury should answer, rather than a judge.

As for VanVoorhis, it turns out that the case against him was also shot down, but on specific procedural grounds. Basically, under Florida law, you have to provide specific notice before suing for defamation. VanVoorhis insists no such notification was given. Cumins insists that it was but there was a procedural mistake in letting the court know. Either way, the court granted summary judgment, solely on that issue, rather than discussing any of the free speech issues.

VanVoorhis, represented by Randazza Legal Group (whose cases we seem to write about a lot around here...), followed up by pushing for sanctions, claiming that Comins' lawyer falsely told the court that VanVoorhis had been notified under the law. That motion was denied, though apparently the court called it "a very, very close call."

Comins... in response, appears to have simply filed a new defamation lawsuit against VanVoorhis, using statements from the blog that VanVoorhis set up to cover stories related to the lawsuit itself. I have no idea if the statements in question are actually libelous (though, the bar for defaming a public person, like Comins, is substantially higher than someone else). But, either way, I do question the wisdom of suing yet again, especially suing someone to whom he already lost a lawsuit. It certainly feels like just another attempt to effectively retry the same lawsuit, which still has the feel of a SLAPP. It's just that Comins and his lawyer found different quotes to use.

Of course, every time Comins takes action like this, it just brings the original video and the original story back into the spotlight. I can't see how that helps his image at all. One of the things in defamation cases is that you're supposed to try to take actions to minimize the damages. Suing yet again doesn't seem likely to do that.

Filed Under: blogs, christopher comins, defamation, dogs, matthew vanvoorhis

Demand Media Threatens Critic Blog

from the are-these-lawyers-stupid? dept

There are a ton of so-called "sucks sites" out there, set up to critique or just ridicule a particular company. Early on, companies often tried to sue such sites out of existence using questionable trademark claims. These efforts mostly (though not always) failed. But, more importantly, the process really backfired thanks to the Streisand Effect. Every time a company went legal after a sucks site, the site and its content only got significantly more attention. Two years ago, it was claimed that corporate lawyers had finally wised up and realized that going legal on such sites only gave those sites significantly more attention.

However, since then, we still hear about such legal threats all the time. Apparently there are still a lot of lawyers out there who haven't received the message. The latest apparently is Demand Media, the content farm giant. Its lawyers sent a cease & desist and a takedown to Demand Studio Sucks.

Rather than a full legal threat against the site, it was focused on the fact that some users on the site had apparently uploaded a presentation in the forums, which Demand considered to be proprietary. Thus, the basis of the takedown was that it violated the company's copyrights and trademark. It appears that DSS's ISP overreacted and rather than taking down the specific content, took down the entire forum. Of course, all this has done is drive much more attention to the content Demand wants removed: a presentation slide showing how Demand is trying to increase quality (now that Google has changed its algorithm to punish crappy quality content that Demand has been associated with in the past).

Demand's lawyers claim:

Demand Media has not granted you any license to use the Demand Media trademark, to publish or copy Demand Media copyrighted content, or to publicize Demand Media’s confidential and proprietary business information. Accordingly, in addition to violating Demand Media’s intellectual property rights in the referenced materials, the postings are disruptive, damaging and harmful to our business practices and reputation.

The intellectual property claims seem totally unfounded. There's no trademark claim. There's no consumer confusion or dilution here at all. No one thinks that DSS is "endorsed" by Demand Media. The copyright claim is dubious. Looking at the blog post in question, I can't see how it's not fair use. It's showing a single slide from a presentation that's certainly relevant, and providing significant commentary on that slide.

The "damaging and harmful to our business practices and reputation" claims are also pretty dubious, though I guess there could be some random state law claims they're thinking they could use here. But, I just don't see it. Someone reporting critically on your business may be disruptive and damaging, but is not illegal. And, honestly, the slide presentation in question is hardly some giant corporate secret. The slide is so bland and pointless and corporatey, it doesn't really give away anything.

Honestly, it's hard to believe anyone thought it was a wise move to go after DSS this way. It just gets them more attention and makes Demand look petty and silly. It's no surprise that the Forbes coverage of this story (the original link above) highlights that this happened at the same time as Demand's valuation dropped under $1 billion for the first time....

Filed Under: blogs, critics, legal threats, sucks sites
Companies: demand media

Universal Music Goes To War Against Popular Hip Hop Sites & Blogs

from the bizarrely-misguided dept

A few weeks ago, leading ad firm GroupM, a part of marketing giant WPP, proudly announced that it had "adopted an aggressive new anti-piracy policy" for its digital media buys. What that meant was that it prohibited vendors that it worked with from putting ads on any of a giant list of sites that it had declared were "pirate sites" -- defined as "sites that support piracy or contain any illegally distributed content." That's pretty broad. In fact, TorrentFreak got their hands on the list and noted many rather bizarre entries, including the Internet Archive (archive.org) and BitTorrent's corporate page -- neither of which have anything to do with "piracy" at all. There are some other shockers on the list, including the popular web video site/YouTube alternative, Vimeo, which is about as far from a "pirate" site as you can find. Stunningly, there's also SoundCloud, which has become one of the most popular tools for musicians to promote their own music these days. That's the site where the Beastie Boys streamed their latest album. A pirate site? Are they crazy? You can see the full list embedded below.

While there are many oddities on the list, we wanted to explore one aspect of the list, which is that it appears to show that Universal Music has decided to declare war on the online hip hop ecosystem that promotes its music in a big way -- and some of those sites are hitting back. First of all, it's worth noting that these blogs and sites are considered instrumental to promotion in the hip hop world, and Universal Music knows that. In talking to some of the folks at sites involved, you learn pretty quickly that they get sent tracks and other promotional info from insiders at Universal Music -- including high level execs -- all of the time. On top of that, hip hop artists themselves regularly rely on these same sites, and link people to them via their own blogs and twitter feeds. And yet, a whole bunch of these sites are on GroupM's list... and they got there because Universal Music told GroupM to put those sites on the list:

GroupM's own content producing clients -- such as Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal Music and Summit Entertainment, which produced the popular Twilight series of vampire movies -- have shared their own lists of pirate websites to help create a master copy.

While I don't know which of those companies may be responsible for some of the other headscratchers on the list, the attack on hip hop sites is being pinned squarely on Universal Music by many of the sites involved, and they're not happy. Among those on the list, for example, is Vibe.com, the online site for Vibe Magazine, founded by Quincy Jones of all people, and still considered one of the key sources for news and information about the hip hop and R&B worlds. And yet it's on the list as a pirate site? Really?

Back in 2009, Vibe produced a big list of the "50 hottest rap blogs." This is basically a who's who list of the top sites in hip hop, and the places that most music producers want to see their music appearing, because it's how they get attention these days. Yet, if you run down that list, you start to notice a pattern. An awful lot of those sites are on GroupM's "banned" list. I went through the top 12 sites on that list, and seven of them are "banned" as piracy sites, despite being some of the most popular promotional vehicles for artists and labels alike. Also, a bunch of the top hip hop blogs teamed up a while back to form what was called the New Music Cartel -- and every one of those sites is on the "banned" list.

And, of course, that Vibe list is a couple years old. There are plenty of other top music/hip hop sites that for unclear reasons were also put on the list, and they're not happy about it. For example, there's Complex, an up-and-coming and incredibly popular lifestyle magazine for the 18-34 male demographic. Somehow, they're on the list, and the magazine/site's editor-in-chief recently took his frustration to Twitter, calling out Universal Music and saying this means Universal Music will get less coverage:
Other sites on the list are similarly pissed, though not everyone's willing to talk about it publicly. The ones who should be angry are the musicians who rely on these sites to get their works heard, to build up a fan base, and to become popular, because Universal Music is making that more difficult for them. There are mixed opinions as to why Universal Music is attacking the hip hop blog ecosystem. There's the "left hand/right hand" ignorance theory, in which the lawyers at Universal Music who helped put together this list are so disconnected from reality that they don't realize they're trying to shut down the very sites that the promotions side of the business (and the artists themselves) rely on. There's also the more nefarious theory that Universal Music is sick of having to rely on such sites for promotions, and is seeking to shut down a bunch of them to limit where it can focus its promotions efforts -- perhaps even trying to prop up a few "friendly" sites that it wants to rule the market, over the competition.

Either way, this seems like more evidence of how ridiculous it is to claim it's easy to define "rogue sites." Given the chance, it looks like Universal Music has defined it as sites it doesn't like. The fact that this list includes all sorts of sites that clearly are not piracy sites should give anyone who supports bills like PROTECT IP pause. Defenders of these laws like to say that it's obvious what is and what is not a rogue site -- yet here you have Universal Music and GroupM showing how that definition can be quite broad, and extremely questionable.

No matter what, it seems likely that this move is going to backfire on Universal Music in a big bad way. It's like what would have happened if a record label suddenly declared radio as "piracy" and said that its artists couldn't appear on radio any more. It suggests a company so out of touch with how people find out about new music these days that it has no business being in the business of promoting artists. It also should serve as a warning sign to any artist thinking of signing with Universal Music. Why would you sign to a label that is actively working to kill some of the best sites for promoting your music? I reached out to Universal Music, asking for some comments and answers to a few questions raised in this article, and (not surprisingly) have heard absolutely nothing in response.

Filed Under: blogs, complex, music industry, piracy, rogue sites, vibe
Companies: groupm, universal music, wpp

NY Times Lawyers Shut Down Blog Promoting The NY Times

from the how-backwards-can-you-be? dept

The NY Times continues its drive to irrelevance. As we get ready to hear the details of the NYT's plan to lock itself up online, its lawyers are apparently seeking to shut down people promoting its works. Jonathan Paul, a former web editor at the NY Times, set up a Tumblr blog account last summer, which he used to promote what he felt was "beautiful and unexpected imagery" found on the NY Times website. He did so very much in the spirit of promoting those works, including full credits and links back to the original works at the NY Times. It built up a decent audience of people, driving many of them to the NY Times website. And, in response, the NY Times sent its lawyers to shut down the blog, claiming that it was copyright infringement (found via Mathew Ingram). Paul notes that the blog actually had a decent following within the NYT, and his former colleagues had encouraged the project and helped promote it as well, fully realizing that it was helping their own work get more attention and driving more traffic to the NYT. And then the lawyers stepped in. One more example of why just because you can do something from a legal standpoint, it doesn't mean you should -- and another reason why you tend to make really bad business decisions when you let the lawyers decide to act, without understanding the actual business implications of what you're doing.

Filed Under: blogs, copyright, images, promotion
Companies: ny times

Homeland Security's 'Evidence' For Domain Seizures Also Included Songs Sent By Labels

from the this-gets-worse-and-worse dept

We've already covered some of the serious problems with the "affidavit" filed by Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit, highlighting confusion about both how the internet works and the law itself. The affidavit was written by a recent college grad who appears to have little experience in the subject matter. What we had seen so far was only a partial version of the affidavit, covering the reasons for seizing Torrent Finder's domain. It was full of both technical and legal inaccuracies, which are troubling. The NY Times apparently got its hands on the entire affidavit (though, oddly, doesn't appear to offer it for download, as far as I can tell), and showed part of it to the operator of dajaz1.com, one of the sites that was taken down. The operator of the site notes that many of the examples used in the affidavit of infringing content were sent by the record labels themselves, and he showed the NY Times reporter the emails from labels sending the songs that were named in the affidavit. Hopefully the guy who operates the site has lined up competent legal help, because the more evidence that comes out in this case, the worse and worse Homeland Security/ICE is looking.

Filed Under: blogs, domain names, first amendment, homeland security, ice, promotions, seizures

Homeland Security Presents 'Evidence' For Domain Seizures; Proves It Knows Little About The Internet - Or The Law

from the holy-crap dept

Earlier this week, we noted how the owners of the various hiphop blogs and Torrent-Finder, the torrent search engine, that were seized by Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group still hadn't been provided the details on why their domains were seized. However, that's no longer the case. A partial affidavit and the seizure warrant for those sites has been released, and it highlights how ridiculously clueless Homeland Security is on this issue (you can read the whole thing at the bottom of this post). What's troubling isn't just that the folks who made the decision to seize these domain names don't seem to know what they're talking about, but that they seem to have relied almost exclusively on the MPAA for their (lack of) knowledge on the subject at hand.

It looks like the four blog/forum sites (RapGodFathers, OnSmash, Dajaz1 and RMX4U) and Torrent-Finder were all lumped together into a single warrant and affidavit. The affidavit was written by a Special Agent with ICE, named Andrew Reynolds, who indicates in the affidavit that he only recently graduated from college (he notes that he's only been on the job for one year, but before that he was a "student trainee with the group"). Much of the affidavit relies heavily on the MPAA. This fits with what ICE assistant deputy director Erik Barnett said soon after the seizures, admitting that they basically just took what sites Hollywood said were a problem and seized them.

In this case, Mr. Reynolds repeats the debunked stats the MPAA has given out concerning "losses" to Hollywood, including the claim of "domino effects" of piracy -- a claim that has been debunked so many times it's getting stale. The "domino" effects are really all about double, triple and quadruple counting the same dollars -- and, perhaps more importantly, they only look at the domino effect (they usually call it a "ripple effect") in one direction, ignoring the fact that money not spent on movies still gets spent elsewhere (potentially boosting those other industries). That doesn't mean that it's okay to not pay for movies -- but it means that claiming some massive economic "harm" here is misleading at best. Even the GAO -- from the same government Agent Reynolds works for -- has debunked the MPAA's stats, in part because the MPAA refused to explain how it came up with those numbers.

Most of the reasoning behind seizing the blogs is left out of the released document, but the entire section on Torrent-Finder is there, and the level of confusion by Mr. Reynolds is worrisome. First of all, he calls it a "linking" and a "bit torrent website." Earlier in the affidavit, these terms are defined loosely -- without any indication of the unsettled nature of the legal question concerning whether or not simply linking to potentially infringing content is, itself, infringing. Instead, it's simply assumed that linking is not just infringement, but potentially criminal infringement. That's scary. And wrong.

Meanwhile, a "bit torrent website" is defined is a "website through which illegal copies of movies and television shows are shared and transferred." The problem here, of course, is that Torrent-Finder is not, in fact, a "bit torrent website." It hosts no tracker. It hosts no infringing content. It's a search engine. That distinction is entirely ignored. In fact, Agent Reynolds appears to blame Torrent-Finder for anything it finds as a search engine. Anyone at any search engine (or who understands how the internet works) should be horrified by this. It's like saying that Google is liable for everything and anything that people can find by doing a search on Google. Think about that for a second.

From there, it gets even more ridiculous. As part of Agent Reynold's argument as to why Torrent-Finder is liable he points to a series of posts by the Torrent-Finder Admin in the site's forums. Specifically, he names the following:

I was able to view several posts by the user "Torrent Finder," including "Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent," "Piracy in the Music Industry," "Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously," "The First Episode of 'The Walking Dead' Leaks to BitTorrent," and "Piracy domain siezure bill gains support."

Agent Reynolds helpfully provides some of these "posts" in the exhibit. And therein we discover a serious problem. The exhibit shows a page from TorrentFreak.com, the popular blog (who we link to quite often) doing its weekly research report -- and not Torrent-Finder. In fact, if you do searches on those "posts" that Agent Reynolds claims are by Torrent-Finder, you quickly discover that a few are blog posts on TorrentFreak, one is a post from ZeroPaid and the last one is a story at CNET's News.com by Declan McCullough.

In other words, the "support" that Agent Reynolds provides for why Torrent-Finder's domain should be seized is that he claims that Torrent-Finder's admin linked directly to infringing material. But that's not true. Instead, the admin was simply pointing to a bunch of different news stories. Even worse, some of those news stories highlight why the claims of the MPAA, which Agent Reynolds relies upon, are simply made up -- such as TorrentFreak's story about comic artist Steve Lieber (which was actually based on a Techdirt story about how Steve Lieber embraced the so-called "pirates" and ended up making a lot more money -- we later interviewed Steve about his experiences). The CNET article is all about the COICA law -- which is about the legality of seizures like this one. How is that evidence of probable cause?

Even going beyond the fact that Agent Reynolds can't seem to figure out that a search engine is different than a torrent tracker or a torrent hosting site, he also seems to think that linking to blog posts like the ones we write here is probable cause for criminal behavior. Holy crap! That's just downright scary.

The entirety of the evidence against Torrent Finder appears to be that because you could do a search that takes you to another site and because the site's admin linked to some blog posts that discuss -- but do not encourage -- the state of file sharing, that there is probable cause of criminal behavior and your domain can and should be seized without any adversarial trial.

Agent Reynolds' cluelessness in the matter is compounded by the fact that it appears the only folks outside of ICE that he spoke to about what he was doing were at the MPAA itself -- which is hardly an unbiased party. It would be like investigating whether or not an upstart bank was committing fraud, by only talking to a large banking competitor. Who would think that's appropriate? Apparently Agent Reynolds and his bosses at ICE.

Equally troubling is that magistrate judge Margaret Nagle signed off on the warrants (literally, with a rubber stamp) without questioning any of this, from the look of things. Nowhere is there any discussion on how the seizure of domain names has nothing to do with the actual servers. Nowhere is there any discussion about first amendment issues in seizing domain names. Nowhere is there any discussion about prior restraint. Nowhere is there any discussion about the difference between a search engine and a torrent tracker. Nowhere is there any discussion about the difference between an infringing file and a torrent. Nowhere is there any discussion about the difference between a link to a news blog post about current events and encouraging people to download infringing content.

I thought the whole thing was ridiculous before. But now that I've read the affidavit -- at least the part about Torrent Finder -- it's become clear that this is a colossal screwup on the part of Homeland Security, ICE and the US government, based on a freshly minted ICE agent who doesn't seem to understand the technology, being lead around by the nose by MPAA staff with an agenda.

Filed Under: andrew reynolds, blogs, domain names, free speech, homeland security, ice, prior restraint, probable cause, seizures
Companies: torrent finder

Owners Of Hiphop Blogs Seized By Homeland Security Still Haven't Been Told Why

from the prior-restraint? dept

The saga of the domains seized by Homeland Security's Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group continues to get more and more bizarre. We'd already noted that among the domains seized were a bunch of hiphop blogs that artists and record labels regularly used to promote their works and that at least the search engine Torrent-Finder was planning to fight back. As we noted at the time, it seemed like the blogs would have a much stronger case, as there's pretty clear First Amendment problems with the governments' actions.

While it's still not entirely clear what the owners of those blogs are going to do, the NY Times has spoken with some of them and it appears they're certainly exploring their options. I would imagine that the EFF and others have all reached out to them as well. I'm also guessing that the RIAA -- who told ICE to take down these sites -- may actually be getting nervous that it may have pushed too far here. They have to realize that they're going to lose these lawsuits if the domain owners push back. It's classic prior restraint.

What's really scary, though, is that the article notes that the domain owners still have been given no indication of why their sites were seized and may need to wait another 30 to 60 days before they're able to even see the seizure order. That seems ridiculous. You shouldn't just be able to seize a domain name and then tell the owners that they'll find out why nearly three months later. What happened to due process?

Filed Under: blogs, domain names, free speech, homeland security, ice, prior restraint, seizures

Silly 'Vote For Us!' Post

from the ah,-lawyers dept

Normally, I avoid this sorta thing, but since we've received a few messages from supporters urging us to promote this more widely, the ABA Journal (that is, the publication from the American Bar Association) has highlighted Techdirt as one of the "top 100 law blogs," specifically in the "IP Law" section. It's basically us and (you guessed it) a bunch of lawyers. They let people "vote" on which they like, though I don't think voting actually means anything. But, if it warms your heart (as some of you have suggested) to see Techdirt get more votes than a bunch of patent lawyers, well, then go ahead and vote. Seriously, though, some of those other blogs are quite good and I'm not a huge fan of the idea that blogs are "competing" with each other in any way. If you aren't reading some of those other blogs, at least check them out.

Filed Under: blogs, ip law, law

If Newly Seized Domains Were Purely Dedicated To Infringement, Why Was Kanye West Using One?

from the questions,-questions dept

The details of Homeland Security's domain name seizures keeps looking more and more questionable. Early on, people were scratching their heads over the seizure of torrent-finder.com, which was a pure search engine, but the deeper that people are looking into the domains involving copyright claims (many of the seized domains were apparently about trademark/counterfeiting rather than copyright), the more questionable the whole situation looks. Torrent-finder was just the start. Two more of the seized sites, RapGodfathers and OnSmash are popular hip hop blogs. In fact, both sites note that labels and artists regularly send them their own music, and both sites note that they comply with the DMCA in taking down files based on takedown notices. Even more damning, top artists like Kanye West clearly appreciate sites like this. Just a few weeks ago, Kanye West linked to OnSmash via his Twitter feed.

It really looks like Homeland Security/ICE may have seriously screwed up here. Whether or not seizing domains in general like this is even legal is an open legal question -- and blatantly seizing domains with tons of legit content that the industry and artists regularly used themselves seems like a test case the government doesn't want just waiting to happen. Hopefully the folks behind both blogs have already gotten in touch with various civil liberties/free speech lawyers who can help make them into perfect test cases to show that the government can't just seize web sites without due process.

Filed Under: blogs, copyright, domain names, free speech, seizures