WASHINGTON DC – The US Department of Justice, in cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seized 82 domain names in an action deemed “Cyber Monday Crackdown,” also known as “Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0”. These seizures resulted from the online sales of counterfeit goods bearing the trademarks of US companies, as well as infringement of copyrighted works.
In this action, the DOJ targeted online retailers selling counterfeit or infringing works on items such as athletic apparel, sunglasses, shoes, handbags, sports equipment, software, DVDs, and music CDs.
The timing of the seizures is notable, as Congress is currently contemplating the enactment of a new bill titled the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The proposed bill will allow government agencies to suspend a website?s domain name if it is found to be “dedicated to infringing activities”, meaning that the domain name is designed to offer or facilitate the transfer of copyright infringing or counterfeit materials. Though the recent seizure action was not taken under the new bill, but rather a seizure warrant, the DOJ and ICE have been looking for more robust means to combat the infringement of US copyrights and trademark registrations over the Internet. Most recently, the Department of Homeland Security created a National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center that combines the resources of ICE, US Customs, the FBI, the FDA, the Postal Inspection Service and others into a group tasked with coordinating enforcement actions related to the global protection of the intellectual property of United States companies.
Detractors like the Bittorrent news blog TorrentFreak argue that these intellectual property enforcement actions are overreaching, and result in the suppression of free speech. In this most recent action, the domain name of torrent-finder.com, a search engine website that merely links to third party websites containing Bittorrent files and looks remarkably different from a counterfeit retailer, was seized. TorrentFinder is still active on its alternative domain name, torrent-finder.info. Additionally, the domain names of two hip-hop blogs, onsmash.com and rapgodfathers.com, were seized for linking to third party websites that contained copyrighted materials.
Both websites state that they comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a US law concerning notice and takedown procedures for the removal of copyright infringing content, while OnSmash claims to receive the links displayed on its blog from hip-hop record labels themselves. This has led TorrentFreak to warn, “File-sharing link sites that remain in the United States or have their domains registered there should be prepared for trouble, even if they believe they are DMCA compliant.”
These disparate interpretations of the same facts reiterate that the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the Internet age is a balance between competing concerns. Though intellectual property rights-holders must be vigilant in their efforts to police and prosecute infringement, they must also ensure that they manage their brand?s reputation and goodwill in the eye of the public in the process. Modern intellectual property enforcement requires not only legal muscle, but also business finesse.
This column was written by Attorney John Di Giacomo at Traverse Legal. For more information, click on TraverseLegal.Com
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