Over the last few months as you know Homeland Security, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been seizing domains that they claim were either selling fake or knockoff goods, or engaged in the transmission of copyrighted material (including the 84,000 innocent domains that were returned).
Yesterday ICE announced the first arrest.
Bryan McCarthy 32 from Texas, was arrested and has been charged with criminal copyright infringement for “reproduction and distribution” of copyrighted material.
The feds alleged that McCarthy operated a site on one of the seized domains, Channelsurfing.net, where links to external sports streams were listed.
“The thing about my site is we never streamed anything, we always linked from other sites like justin.tv, veetle, vshare.tv, zonein.tv and others,” he told TorrentFreak.com.
“Brian McCarthy allegedly sought to profit by intercepting and then streaming live sporting events, hiding behind the anonymity of the internet to make a quick buck through what is little more than high-tech thievery,” Southern District of New York Attorney Preet Bhara commented.
“This arrest sends a clear message that this office, will vigorously protect valuable intellectual property rights through arrests and domain name seizures,” Bhara added.
“We will continue to investigate illegal streaming of programming on the Internet in an effort to preserve legitimate and creative business interests and deter others from engaging in online piracy,” Homeland Security agent James Hayes said.
According to Torrentfreak.com McCarthy was tracked down through information provided by the domain registrar NameCheap, Google, Paypal, Comcast, and the site’s advertisers. The documents also revealed that he made at least $90,000 from advertisements during the last five years.
If found guilty, McCarthy faces a maximum prison sentence of five years.
His site I don’t believe streamed anything, as he said in his statement he only provided links to streams that were occurring on other sites. Seems like they should go after the people actually broadcasting, but instead they are going after people who are providing links. So now it is illegal to share information (in the form of links) online in the US.
Forget about the murderers, rapists, and hardcore thieves, let’s spend tax payer money on chasing people who share links… it’s insane.
I wonder if this might deter illegal uploading of pirated porn for “free” downloading at tube sites facilitating it? As someone involved in porn, I’ve heard that many companies have closed or cut way back in their production budgets.
What happened to the right of the dot article I saw this morning? I was looking forward to reading that.
@TLD – I agree completely. $90K doesn’t sound like a lot of money being generated for being online for 5 years. It makes no sense to me to go after a link directory when you can hit the site that is actually streaming the content. If the point is to go after the big streaming offenders, it sounds like the government whiffed again.
@ Headline
This arrest sends a clear message that this office, will vigorously protect valuable intellectual property rights
——–
Great News: Now we have Government help in protecting …
” Valuable intellectual property rights” from UDRP / WIPO
and there terrorist type systematic procedures to “Steal Valuable Domains”
via in-staff and counsel bribery and elementary routine theft by deception.
@Edie
I think even if he made $90 million dollars it shouldn’t matter. He was basically being a “TV Guide for sports” on the internet. He wasn’t like a Justin.tv site that was broadcasting anything, he was literally providing links to where people can watch stuff.
This means if I go to a NY Giants forum, and I tell people that if they can’t see the game that they can see it on Justin.tv/whatever because someone is broadcasting it there, that I’m breaking the law. It’s insane. And the irony is that the people in charge of the operation seem like they have no technical understanding of the basic difference between posting a link and broadcasting a stream. Must be what happens when you take people trained to catch terrorists and put them in charge of technical internet crackdowns.
the government should at least park the seized domains to make at least some money from this nonsense.
Repost:
We see it everywhere. Corporations are trying to take control
over our communications tools.
Frequently, they are assisted by old hapless money grubing politicians,
who are also aspiring for the same control in there position, citing terrorist concerns or some other BS McCarthy type of SCAREWORD of the day.
We should see this in perspective of the REVOLTS happening right now in the
ARAB WORLD / CHINA.
I’m a bit supporter of IP rights, but this is ridiculous.
It’s supposed to be, “Use a gun, go to jail.”
Not, “Post links, go to jail.”
Sheesh.
Sorry, meant “… a big supporter …”
I would have thought that the huge US corporations that hide their profits offshore from the Gov would be far more of a threat to the US economy than someone who made $18k a year linking to other peoples websites .
Is linking to the same as intercepting ?
There must be far more to this story because this sounds too Bizarre.
If they’re going to start locking people up for that they better get all those fema camps ready to go because there is’nt enough room in your prisons.
“I think even if he made $90 million dollars it shouldn’t matter. He was basically being a “TV Guide for sports” on the internet. He wasn’t like a Justin.tv site that was broadcasting anything, he was literally providing links to where people can watch stuff.” – TLD
No, he WAS streaming these on Channelsurfing.net. It was not just a “TV Guide”.
As freaky as it is that DHS did a door kick on this one, the guy DID make over $1500/month from this… he WAS streaming illegal content through his site.. .sure, it was published on other sites but he made it available ON HIS SITE… there was no “go to this site to watch” there was “watch this right here”… even though it was pulled from the other site.
Do I like the heavy handedness of DHS? Hell No.
But be real, this guy was a criminal. All arguments to the contrary are a bit pointless.
Most of the contents are hosted on sites like megavideo, vidxden, loombo, smotri and so on.
Tony
The post on Rightofthedot was in draft form and unfinished.
It somehow auto published, maybe through some update my tech guy did, but in any event I was not complete and pulled it down.
It will be back up once its complete and proofread
This is a slippery slope. It will be interesting to see the fallout from this.
His domain was taken because it was .net or .com and the US has authority of this? But if it were .somethingelse, they couldnt have seized the domain?
Something is REALLY wrong here. Even if he was streaming content, I have no idea if he was or not, WHY is DHS involved in this? It has nothing to do with national security.
NameCheap.com rats out their client? Nice. Obviously NameCheap.com may not be the best place to register these kinds of domains.
The thing is any US based domain registrar will rat out their clients if they get a notice from the copyright holders. Advertisers, webhosting, and most other company that are associated with the website will too.
The US government works in the interest of the groups with the most money. The music and film industry have been pumping money into lobbying for stricter control and harsher punishments for people who spread copyright material. Many of the US laws are not geared towards being right or wrong, but about helping the interest groups who have pushed money into getting the laws to conform to their interests.
Getting hard to recognize this as the America I grew up in.
DHS is getting outta control! UGH!
DHS always holds me up at airports.
What does “homeland security” (if you think about that term) have anything to do with this?