It's a murky question - what constitutes criminal rather than civil infringement. As far as I can make out, from this and a couple of the earlier seizures, as far as the feds are concerned it is that if they can go to a site and in a *single click or less* have access to infringing copyright - then that is distribution in the criminal sense, and the judges appear to agree. The further aspects, and this is what separates out the sites in question from, say, Google, is that, since the sites were primarily set up for this purpose, is that the intent can be proven that they * knowingly* engage in such practice, for *profit*. j On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Dev Anand Teelucksingh <admin@ttcsweb.org>wrote:
"When the US government decides to take down a website offering access to free TV streams over the Internet, it doesn't mess around. Newly unsealed court documents show that Brian McCarthy, the 32-year old alleged operator of Channelsurfing.net, got the complete treatment—investigators dug into his domain name registrar, his ISP, his Gmail account, his ad brokers, and the Texas driver's license database. They even sent a surveillance team to the Deer Park, Texas home where McCarthy lived with his parents.
McCarthy had his Channelsurfing.net domain name seized on February 1 as part of the controversial "In Our Sites" investigation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That program seizes domain names, often of foreign websites, without an adversarial hearing; special agents simply convince a federal judge that the domain should be seized, and it is. Domains are replaced with an ICE logo and explanation that they now belong to the US government."
Read rest of article:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/illegal-tv-streamers-heres-h...
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