Jun 15, 2011 16:37 GMT  ·  By

A Spanish company whose domain names were seized by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year, without any advance notice, has filed a court petition to have them returned.

Puerto 80 Projects, based in Arteixo, Spain, is the rightful owner of rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org, two domains seized by ICE and the Justice Department at the end of January.

At the time of the seizure, Rojadirecta was one of the top 100 websites in Spain and had over 850,000 registered users. The site is used as a discussion board for sports, politics and other topics.

ICE's sudden seizure was based on probable cause that Rojadirecta is responsible for copyright infringement because it indexes links to streams of sporting events that are already available on the Internet.

The petition [pdf], filed by the Spanish company in the Southern District of New York, calls for the immediate return of its domains and outlines the difficulties the company had in communicating with the relevant authorities about this case.

The company's counsel was sent back and forth between the U.S Attorney's Office and ICE since February and failed to have any meaningful conversation with the government until it expressed an intention to start legal action.

Puerto 80 asks the court to order the release of its domain names as soon as possible given that any delay would cause the company significant hardship and might alienate some of its users forever.

The company also points out that its business and websites were ruled as lawful by two different Spanish courts after a legal battle that lasted multiple years.

"There is no risk that the domain names will be unavailable for any eventual trial, and Puerto 80 will continue to suffer substantial hardship—a reduction in traffic to the Rojadirecta site and inability of many of its users to access their accounts, in addition to a deprivation of First Amendment rights—if the domain names are not immediately returned to Puerto 80," the company writes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) salutes this effort to challenge ICE's controversial domain seizures. "We're very glad that Rojadirecta is fighting back so that this and other domain name seizures can receive more careful judicial consideration. We'll be following the case closely and expect to weigh in as amicus as well," EFF's senior staff attorney Abigail Phillips says.