It appears that the U.S. government has resumed Operation In Our Sites, a program aimed at capturing counterfeit and pirated products online. Today a federal judge in Nevada ruled in favor of luxury goods maker Chanel in a battle against websites trafficking counterfeit luxury goods. The court can now seize all questionable domain names, transferring them to a US-based registrar GoDaddy. Wait, what?
Venkat Balasubramani writes about this bizarre case Eric Goldman’s technology and law blog. He asks why the case was took place in Nevada, and asks why not one of the 228 websites were able to say something in their defense. It is unclear whether all of these sites are even registered in the United States.
The judge has also ordered that Internet search engines and social media websites Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Google all “de-index” the domain names. This would completely remove them from all search results. Bing and Google have not yet de-indexed the sites.
Chanel makes luxury goods and is concerned about counterfeiting. It has gone after counterfeit websites and seized approximately 600 domain names. A November 14 order added an additional 228 names to that list, including sites hahabags.net and cheapchanelbagsoutlet.net.
In the past day, seizures like this have occurred on the popular file-hosting service MegaUpload. Yesterday, on Cyber Monday, the government seized 100+ domain names in order to “protect the commercial interests of US companies.”
And this is all happening while SOPA, the bill that would severely censor the Internet, is still up for debate.
Some sites that have been taken down aren’t even registered in the U.S. In order to take down a site, Operation In Our Sites must obtain a seizure warrant foam a federal judge. The domain names are then re-directed to display a seizure notice.
Image via MyStuffSpace.com.
