The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have started a large new round of domain name seizures as part of a global crackdown on piracy. Although the seizures are disputable, these types of governmental actions would be legitimized by the SOPA bill. This initiative is called “Operation In Our Sites.”

US District Court Judge Paul Crotty has ruled that the 1st Amendment does not prevent the government from seizing web domains. The issue was raised by the ICE’s shuttering of a sports streaming website called Rojadirecta.com. The owners of Rojadirecta claimed that because the site contained some legal content, seizing the website counted as a suppression of free speech. The judge disagreed, stating that “the main purpose of the Rojadirecta websites […] is to catalogue links to the copyrighted athletic events – any argument to the contrary is clearly disingenuous.” [Gizmodo]

This week, the U.S. government has taken down some domain names. The Department of Justice and the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement seized several domain names related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. However one of the domain names was on a free DNS provider so 84,000 other websites were wrongly accused of the aforementioned crimes. Thousands of website owners were surprised with the above banner. The domain names and subdomains were restored on Sunday, but it took about 3 days before the image disappeared completely. [TorrentFreak]

The U.S. government has been proactive about taking down torrent websites. ICE – Homeland Security Investigations seized the domain of BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder.com without giving them a court notice or complaint.