We've been covering the ridiculous domain name seizures by Homeland Security's Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group over the last few weeks, and it seems that nearly every day we come across more info that makes the seizures look like a bigger and bigger mistake.

With one specific site, dajaz1.com, we noted that the songs used by Agent Reynolds to support his claims, had actually been sent by the artists or record label representatives themselves. Dajaz1 is a blog, not a forum. Agent Reynolds called it a "linking site" which downplays and/or ignores the fact that there is a lot more on the site than just links.

The four songs used by Agent Reynolds to support the domain name seizure of dajaz1.com all appear to have been sent for the purpose of promoting in this manner. The Dajaz1 site was quite popular with DJs, and was regularly used by labels, artists and promoters as a way to get their music out to those DJs. It does not appear that Reynolds checked into any of this. Instead, he simply asked Carlos Linares, the VP of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs for the RIAA, who claimed that all four songs represented "pirated songs" that were "unauthorized copies of rights holder's works," even though there are questions about whether or not he actually knew that for a fact, or even had the right to speak for some of the artists/songs in question.

On top of that, if you dig into the dajaz1 website, you quickly see that it is not at all focused on just offering up as much as possible to download. In multiple cases, the blogger notes that he will not post links to too many tracks from an album, suggesting that the site is not at all focused on getting as much infringing material up as possible, as implied in the affidavit. If that was the goal, why would it specifically refuse to post links to more than just a few songs?

The further you dig into this, the deeper you get into just how ridiculous the music industry works these days - with various subsidiaries and independent promoters and DJs and mixtapes, and all sorts of stuff that the labels very specifically support with one hand, while pretending to be above all that with the other. There are more details that I'm still researching, but some of it suggests that the last thing the major record labels want is for this to go to court, because it'll expose all sorts of things that the labels are doing that they probably don't want exposed.

Either way, even if we go with Occam's Razor and assume that these four cases are examples of the left hand (lawyers) not knowing what the right hand (promotions/marketing) was doing, it highlights why it's a total mistake (and probably a violation of the law) for Homeland Security to have simply seized these domains without an adversarial hearing - or any contact with the sites in question themselves. Some of our commenters have insisted that all of these sites were "obviously criminally infringing," but the evidence suggests an extremely different story. And it's that sort of thing which is why we're supposed to have due process in the US before we shut stuff down or seize things.

Contrary to what some believe, copyright infringement is rarely a "black and white" case - which is why we have trials to determine whether or not something is actually infringing. This is even more true in cases of criminal copyright infringement, which has a much higher bar to prove. So it's beyond baffling that Homeland Security and the magistrate judge who approved these seizures felt that it was simply okay to seize them prior to any adversarial hearing, where much of these details might have come out.