Judge Orders Hundreds of Websites Delisted From Search Engines, Social Networks 308
An anonymous reader writes "A federal judge has ruled that a number of a websites trafficking in counterfeit Chanel goods can have their domains seized and transferred to a new registrar. Astonishingly, the judge also ordered that the sites must be de-indexed from all search engines and all social media websites. Quoting the article: 'Missing from the ruling is any discussion of the Internet's global nature; the judge shows no awareness that the domains in question might not even be registered in this country, for instance, and his ban on search engine and social media indexing apparently extends to the entire world. (And, when applied to U.S.-based companies like Twitter, apparently compels them to censor the links globally rather than only when accessed by people in the U.S.) Indeed, a cursory search through the list of offending domains turns up poshmoda.ws, a site registered in Germany. The German registrar has not yet complied with the U.S. court order, though most other domain names on the list are .com or .net names and have been seized.'"
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
Average person doesn't understand internet. Shocking details and film at 11.
It's a little more complicated than that. Average person doesn't understand internet, but makes decisions which require such understanding and have wide reach and consequences.
The average person doesn't understand the human body, but only surgeons get to operate on them.
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:1, Insightful)
They're banning illegal counterfeit goods to protect consumers. I think that all you whiners need to DRINK YO PRUNE JUICE.
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
domains seized and transferred to a new registrar (Score:5, Insightful)
So they are taking the domains and blacklisting them.
Good luck for the next guy who buys these domains, what a way to ruin a business, buy a domain that is court ordered not to appear in any social networking or search.
Meatspace equivalent? (Score:5, Insightful)
US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (Score:5, Insightful)
WASHINGTON — To mark the official beginning of the online holiday shopping season, known as Cyber Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), the Department of Justice and the FBI Washington Field Office have seized 150 website domain names that were illegally selling and distributing counterfeit merchandise.
source [ice.gov]
Not only are there multiple alphabet soups working in collaboration on this, but taxpayer dollars, to use a talking point, tax payer dollars are being used to protect the profits of companies that a) people buying cheap counterfeits don't usually have money to buy the high dollar stuff or choose not to and b) many companies hide their profits overseas to avoid all the tax's imposed on them while simultaneously lobby congress to make import/export easier with the slave friggin labor used to make these fucking pointless articles of consumer whoredom. National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, ie, America production and creation capacity has been reduced to rubbish so we'll sue/block/censor anything that threatens the bank accounts. I'm not a 99%'er and all that jazz; this is a problem between stupid electorate continually rel-electing politicians who do not represent the people and are easily bought out. There are of course many more problems than this, but to boil it down this story is just icing on the turd-cake that will be served to future historians who write about the downfall of America.
Boggles the mind on one hand, on the other hand, well, nothing new under the sun, eh?
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a surprise.
Always register overseas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "less harmful" where censorship is concerned. We know for the experience every society has had with it going back to the start of the written word, that once you start censoring it never stops. Today its websites that might be violating copyright, tomorrow its anything a senator does not like said about him, the day after its whatever some corporation does not want you be able to publish.
All public censorship is harmful, and it should always be opposed vehemently.
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:3, Insightful)
But, apparently, enough of the other 97% still click the link.
Re:all your bases are belong to us (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends entirely on how the judge implements enforcement of his ruling.
I disagree.
The search engines are publishing the existence of the counterfeit wares sites upon the request of the people using the search engines. The judge is telling the SEs that they are not allowed to report facts (that is, the existence and location of those sites).
This is censorship any way you slice it, even if you agree with the motivation of the judge.
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:3, Insightful)
As usual, people aren't thinking the security through. If we are going to create a new mechanism whereby judges have the capacity to censor out counterfeit traffickers, then all this work that we're going to do to, will also create a mechanism for censoring out Coke. You can say that would be an illegal use of the mechanism, but nevertheless it will exist, and therefore the Internet will need to protect against it.
BTW, another weird thing about blanket censorship like this, is that "all search engines and all social media sites" were not party to the lawsuit. At least 99% of them (probably closer to 100%) weren't served, were not represented in court, etc. Yet somehow they have a judicial order forcing them to alter their own data. Not that any of those parties (at least the big ones who got named) would really give a damn about the counterfeiter, but it's slimy (and possibly not binding) to impose on them.
Re:all your bases are belong to us (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
They're banning illegal counterfeit goods to protect consumers
Protect consumer from what? What is so dangerous in a cheap counterfeit Coco Channel purse or a Rolex replica?
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:2, Insightful)
On the off chance that you're not trolling in a phenomenally stupid manner: Take your cultural relativism and your totalitarian apologetics and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.
My "less harmful" was meant primarily in the sense that a posteriori censorship of known content is more specific (less likely to result in an unintended match) than a priori censorship based on keywords or similar patterns. But if you want to look at it from a moral perspective, then yes, Google's censorship of sites selling illegal wares is still less harmful than China's censorship of peaceful dissent.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I can't think of any.
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
They're banning illegal counterfeit goods to protect consumers.
No they're not. The way you do that is by tracking the sales, seizing the goods, and putting the vendors in jail.
What the judge is doing is banning speech. Banning a person who should be tried and (as far as I can tell) found guilty of trafficking in illegal merchandise from speaking. But it's so easy for the government to sit on it's fat ass like Henry VIII, wave a greasy drumstick in the air, and proclaim the Internet Death Sentence. By contrast, having actual law enforcement officers tracking down actual physical crimes, then wading through the slow and expensive process of having a real trial with an actual defendant is just far too much work.
Electronic justice is like clicking through channels on teevee. You can do it while stuffing your face with bon bons. No defendant to object, no defense attorney making arguments about how various things are illegal or unconstitutional. It's so much easier, don't you see? And that's what we want -- easy pseudo-justice that favors big lobbyists. In fact, after polling all the power-brokers in the halls of Congress, a recent study found 100% agreement -- easy pseudo-justice that favors the corrupt is Good For America.
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
By GP's logic then I could make the argument that the particular kind of censorship in the US that is being critiqued in this thread is also a cultural phenomenon above all else, and that it should be best approached from that perspective of non-judgmental understanding of "US culture" despite anyone's objection that the "culture" is a result of brainwashing, and that the torrent of +5 Insightful morally indignant posts we see in this thread being directed at the US is in fact a manifestation of their ignorance of US culture.
Do we want to go down that path?
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:4, Insightful)
We live in an age of rapid, global communication -- the old economic arguments about possession fueling production simply do not apply anymore. The fact that most people find child pornography to be disgusting is no reason to make it illegal to possess. New technologies necessitate a new approach to prosecuting child molesters, and we need to make sure that we are actually prosecuting child molesters and not just picking up low-threat people who have some child porn on their hard drives (which in all likelihood was downloaded without any transaction or trade).
Re:For non US-filtered search results (Score:5, Insightful)
A Rolex replica doesn't perform like a Rolex under real conditions. For example Rolex has fantastic quality water seals and is safe to use under high pressure diving, or in the shower (which is rare for a watch). The fakes will not hold up to that kind of use.
And this is dangerous exactly how?
It's cheap (thus won't bankrupt you and let your kids starving) and, in the greatest majority of cases, the owner knows it is replica anyway - so it may be less tempted to take a deep dive with it (how many of the replica buyers are deep divers anyway?)
Re:all your bases are belong to us (Score:4, Insightful)
If by "yell fire in a crowded theater" you mean "argue against conscription for a brutal and pointless war in which millions died, an obviously political form of speech" - which is what the case that phrase came from was about - then I think you'll find a lot of people do. Strange that.