14 DAY TRIAL // A federal judge has ruled that the domain seizure of the rojadirecta.com domain by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not cause substantial hardship to its legal owner, Spanish firm Puerto 80.
Last year, ICE, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, began seizing domain names believed to facilitate copyright infringement or the sale of counterfeit products.
The .com, .net and .org TLDs are all operated by companies based in the United States which means that all domains with these extensions are under US jurisdiction despite being owned by companies and organizations from all over the world.
In February ICE seized a domain name called rojadirecta.com because it linked to unauthorized sporting streams hosted on other websites.
Rojadirecta is operated by a Spanish company called Puerto 80 and has over 850,000 registered users. At the time of the domain seizure it was one of the most popular websites in Spain.
After months of trying to work things out with ICE, Puerto 80 petitioned the Southern New York District Court for the release of its domain name until it has a chance to take its case to court.
The company claimed its business is being damaged and many of its users are being alienated. It also cited First Amendment issues with people not being able to access its popular discussion forums.
The judge refused to give the domain back and ruled that "Rojadirecta has a large internet presence and can simply distribute information about the seizure and its new domain to its customers."
Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the organizations that submitted an amicus brief in support of the Spanish company, characterized the ruling as head-scratching.
"Perhaps the court thinks Puerto 80 should buy some google ads? Would court come to the same conclusion if the site in question was youtube.com? (Maybe so, which is even more frightening)," McSherry said.
In addition, the judge ruled that the seizure does not violate the First Amendment right of anyone because users can partake in the same discussions on other forums.
"Here's the thing: the Supreme Court doesn't agree. The fact that you can get information via a second route does not mean that there is no speech problem," McSherry's says, quoting two Supreme Court rulings that make this very clear.