Sometimes you have to take a stand, even if that means standing against the United States Department of Homeland Security. That is what Mozilla is doing concerning the MafiaaFire extension to Firefox.
MafiaaFire redirects traffic from seized domains to other domains. According to Mozilla legal blogger Harvey Anderson MafiaaFire “seized domain names allegedly were used to stream content protected by copyrights of professional sports franchises and other media concerns.” The domains in question alleged acts of piracy have little to do with Firefox itself and MafiaaFire just redirects from those seized sites. Mozilla is not going to disable the extension just because DHS wants them to. It wants legal justification.
Anderson, writing on hja’s blog, said that Mozilla has asked DHS some very common sense questions as to why they should disable the extension.
According to Anderson, the questions Mozilla asked were similar to these:
- Have any courts determined that the Mafiaafire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
- Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
- Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down the Mafiaafire add-on is based?
The question about the extension is less about professional sports teams, piracy and copyright and more about threats to the open Internet. Mozilla is an open source supporter and its developers are big contributors to open source projects and community members on code-sharing forum GitHub. Mozilla is looking for due process and transparency from DHS. It is the right stand to take, even if MafiaaFire and the seized sites it redirects from are not the most upstanding citizens of the World Wide Web.
“The problem stems from the use of these government powers in service of private content holders when it can have unintended and harmful consequences,” Anderson wrote. “Long term, the challenge is to find better mechanisms that provide both real due process and transparency without infringing upon developer and user freedoms traditionally associated with the Internet.”
