While we've been paying a lot of attention to the domain seizures by Homeland Security's ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) group in November, we also covered a similar operation that took place back in June. It's been noted that no actual charges have been filed against the operators of those sites. But in early December, without most people noticing, apparently ICE finally filed to officially commence civil forfeiture procedures against those domains (thanks to Terry Hart who noticed this). To understand what's going on here, I'll again point you to Hart's explanation of the difference between seizure and forfeiture. Basically, seizure is simply the first step in a forfeiture process (a process, that we've noted is regularly abused by law enforcement). It doesn't appear the owners of these sites have been charged with anything yet at all. It's just that, effectively, the sites themselves are being charged with being used in the commission of a crime.

There's nothing particularly surprising or enlightening in the forfeiture proceeding document, other than acting as official notification if anyone wishes to claim a legal interest in the "property" in question. They would need to contest the forfeiture within 60 days of December 17th. This covers the domain names: TVshack.net, Movies-Link.tv, ZML.com, Now-movies.com, ThePirateCity.org, PlanetMoviez.com, Filespump.com. As far as I know, there has been little indication that any of the original domain holders for those domains plan to contest the forfeiture process. Many have already moved on to other domains anyway.

There's nothing all that enlightening in the filing. It's pretty similar to the affidavit we saw that was used to seize the more recent domain names, with a few similar technical errors, but nothing necessarily as egregious as the errors in the more recent case. Basically, an ICE agent downloaded or streamed a few movies on some sites the MPAA pointed them to. The MPAA then said "those movies are not legally available online," and, voila, now ICE says it should get to own the domain name. Oddly, it does not appear that anyone at ICE sought a third party, non-biased analysis of the legality of what was going on. They simply relied on the MPAA entirely.

All that said, I have to admit that I'm still at a loss as to how this really fits under Homeland Security's mandate. Defenders of this point out that ICE has long had intellectual property issues under its purview, but those issues were supposed to be focused on preventing counterfeit products from entering the country. To extend that to internet websites seems like a huge stretch. Either way, it seems like Homeland Security must have more important things to work on.