Domain Name News

US Government Returns Seized RojaDirecta Domain Names

Posted: 29 Aug 2012 02:19 PM PDT

As reported by Wired today the US Government has returned the seized domain names of Spanish forum RojaDirecta.com/org domains after the government dropped their claim on Wednesday – 19 months after the domains were originally seized.

The seizing of the domains happened as part of the “Operation in our Sites” together with eight other sites that were accused of being connected to broadcasting pirated video streams of professional sports.

The government, which seized the domain names for simply including links to copyrighted content, dropped the Rojadirecta claim, seemingly due to a recent ruling by Judge Richard Posner. Posner, one of the nation's most respected judges, knocked down charges that a video bookmarking site was infringing copyright law, just because its users linked to copyrighted videos.

The operator of the site, Puerto 80, said the site that has 865,000 registered users has not committed any copyright infringement. As a discussion board about sports, politics and other topics some of the users may have linked to pirated streams. The group had been trying to negotiate with the US government, but were told that they would only receive control over their domain names again if the site would prohibit its users from linking to any US content.

It looks like the domains are currently though, the site is not back online yet. Interestingly it also looks like the “last updated” date in the registry has not been changed when the domain was seized or returned.