The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency
(ICE) wants to take down web sites that use the .com and .net top level domains
(TLD)
regardless of whether their servers are based in the US.
Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of ICE said
told the Guardian that the agency will actively target web sites that are
breaking US
copyright laws even if their servers are not based in the US.
According to Barnett, all web sites that use the .com and .net TLDs are fair
game and that, since the Domain Name Service (DNS) indexes for those web sites
are routed through the US-based registry Versign, ICE believes it has enough to
“seek a US
prosecution”.
According to the Guardian, ICE is not focusing its
efforts just on web sites that stream dodgy content but those that link to
them, something the newspaper claims has “considerable doubt as to whether this
is even illegal in Britain”. It points out that the only such case to have been
heard by a judge in the UK was
dismissed.
Barnett said, “By definition, almost all copyright
infringement and trademark violation is transnational. There's very little
purely domestic intellectual property theft.”
Read more here.
