14 DAY TRIAL // The City of London Police has taken on a habit of asking domain registrars to suspend domains without having a court order to back the request, so it has been dealing with quite a few rejection messages.
According to TorrentFreak, about 70 requests were denied, while only a total number of five were granted.
The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, also known as PIPCU, has been sending warning letters to site owners and asking them to start doing things in accordance to the law or shut down their operations.
“If a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar informing them of the criminality and seeking suspension of the site,” the City of London Police said.
So, the Police has been contacting the domain registrars trying to get them to cooperate and take down the alleged infringing domains. Conforming with a request that is not backed by a legal order, such as a court document, would leave these registrars open to lawsuits, so they mostly chose not to comply with the demands.
TorrentFreak writes that it has filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the police to obtain more insight into the process. The documents received following this request indicate that, after its launch in the last quarter of 2013, the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit has sent letters to the operators of 107 pirate sites in response to notifications from groups defending the copyright of the entertainment industry.
PIPCU has also tried its hand with the domain name registrars, asking them to suspend the pirate sites. 75 domain names were on the list, but only five were actually taken down. The numbers are quite interesting, especially since there were several registrars that complied with the request last year before figuring out that they didn’t really have to do anything in the absence of a court order.
Most of them, in fact, refused to do anything without due process and some, such as EasyDNS, even helped transfer some suspended domains away from the Public Domain Registry, which is one of the few that actually acted upon the request of the British police.
“When somebody identifying themselves as law enforcement, directs registrars to takedown functioning websites or even hijack their traffic in the absence of some legal due process, then we are in the early stages of living in a world of ‘rule by decree,’” said EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic.
Even though its tactics are clearly not working very well, PIPCU continues to try taking down sites the music and movie industries accuse of infringing their copyright.