The Department of Homeland Security, allegedly with help from ICANN, has seized the domain name of Torrent Finder, a torrent search engine returning results also available on Google.Since yesterday, users trying to access torrent-finder.com are greeted with a notice that reads: "
This domain name has been seized by ICE – Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court under the authority of 18 U.S.C. §§ 981 and 2323."
The message goes on to suggest that copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods are the reasons why this domain was forcefully taken from its owner.
The incident raises serious concerns for several reasons. First, there's the nature of the site itself, a search engine that links back to other websites.
In other words, what the government want to say is that Torrent Finder facilitated copyright infringement by returning results for non-copyrighted .torrent files, hosted on other sites, that could enable sharing of copyrighted works.
Since locating such files is also possible through Google, why isn't Google's domain also seized? Could it be because they are the largest Internet services company in the world? If that's the case then this is a really unbalanced and unfair distribution of justice.
In addition, the Torrent Finder admin
told TorrentFreak that his registrar, Go Daddy, had no part in the domain seizure and that it was done directly by ICANN, the US-based organization managing the DNS root zone.
In May 2009, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, who now serves as European Commissioner for Justice, raised the issue of ICANN's accountability to a single government, the United States.
"
ICANN decisions affect millions of citizens and companies in the world. The courts of California alone are certainly not best placed to handle legal challenges originating in all continents of the world," Mrs. Reding said [
pdf] at the time.
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