11:19 AM
Amit Khajuria
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency believes it has the authority to shut down any and all .com and .net websites that run afoul of copyright law, even if the site's servers are hosted overseas. Erik Barnett, the agency's assistant deputy director, told the U.K.'s Guardian that ICE will seek to shut down overseas sites it believes are breaking U.S. copyright law and attempt to extradite website owners. Has ICE found a legal loophole? Perhaps it has. The reason ICE feels its authority extends to any .com and .net domain overseas is because they're all routed through Verisign, a registry service based in Virginia. As far as Barnett is concerned, that alone gives ICE the right extradite foreign site owners to the U.S. on piracy charges.
"Without wishing to get into the particulars of any case, the general goal of law enforcement is to arrest and prosecute individuals who are committing crimes," Barnett said. "That is our goal, our mission. The idea is to try to prosecute."
ICE isn't just targeting sites that host or stream copyrighted material, but those that link to it. One of the more publicized cases is that of Richard O'Dwyer, a 23-year-old British student ICE wants to extradite for running TVShack.net, which linked to non-licensed streams of movies and TV shows. Barnett declined to comment on this specific case, but did offer up some general comments related to chasing linking sites.
"I'll give you an analogy. A lot of drug dealing is done by proxy -- you rarely give the money to the same person that you get the dope from," Barnett explains. "I think the question is, are any of these people less culpable?"
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