14 DAY TRIAL // The registrars involved in the torrent site domain seizure requested by the City of London Police are exposing themselves to disciplinary action by IP address and DNS body ICANN.
Earlier this week it was revealed that several torrent sites have been left without a domain following a request from the City of London Police which had absolutely no legal basis. The list of sites affected by the incident includes ExtraTorrent, SumoTorrent and MisterTorrent, as well as emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com.
The City of London Police has confirmed, in the meantime, that the seizure was done voluntarily and that the registrars have acted on their own and weren’t actually forced, TorrentFreak reports.
“Any of those registrars that actually complied with the UK requests to bring down the torrent domains must allow those domains to simply transfer out, or they themselves will be in violation of the ICANN transfers policy,” said Mark Jeftovic of EasyDNS, a Canadian-based company that refused to comply with a similar request sent out for SumoTorrent.
And while the registrars were open to comply to the demands of the British police, they cannot hold the domains hostage and should allow the site owners to transfer out their names to other registrars, Jeftovic believes.
According to the ICANN Inter-Registrars Transfer Policy, registrars can only take a domain when it was paid for fraudulently or is the subject of a court order by a court of competent jurisdiction. Considering the court order does not exist, the registrars who scrambled to comply with the request could now face some problems.
Yesterday, ExtraTorrent’s owner threatened to go to court over the domain seizure if the site does not become active again seeing as the registrar did not analyze the content of the email sent by the police.