Dajaz1 was initially seized under the 2008 Pro IP Act, at the strength of a testimony that cited several published songs as evidence of copyright infringement. Because it seems, ,any of those songs were actually provided by their copyright holders themselves, but that did not stop the federal government from seizing the URL anyway, and plastering a warning everywhere its homepage. Typically, this sort of action often is the first phase of a two-step process. Once a property is seized, US law dictates that the govt. has 60 days to inform its owner, who can then opt to file a request for its return. If the suspect chooses to file this request within a 35-day window, the feds must then undertake a so-called forfeiture process within 90 days. Failure to take action will require the govt. to come back the valuables to its rightful owner. But that isn’t exactly how things played out in relation to Dajaz1. For more details at the saga, head past the break.
Acting within their rights, Dajaz1′s owners filed a request for return, and were reportedly told that the forfeiture process would soon get underway. When the 90-day deadline came and went with none movement, the site’s lawyer, Andrew B. Bridges, reached out to the govt for explanation. In response, the feds said that they had received an extension from the court, but refused to supply evidence of this extension, claiming that the court order and motion papers were filed under seal. The documents, they replied, couldn’t be disclosed, even in redacted form. This came as news to Bridges, who claims to have never been informed of the extension. In keeping with the lawyer, authorities told him he wouldn’t be notified of future extensions, either, and wouldn’t actually have the possibility to file counterarguments during an adversarial hearing.
This stalemate dragged on for months, due to a chain of mysterious extensions. These extensions, moreover, weren’t even accessible through a L. a. court. When Bridges asked the U.S. attorney for proof of the extensions, he was told that he’d simply ought to “trust” that they were obtained. After letting the last extension expire, the govt ultimately informed Bridges that the domain will be returned to its owners. That happened on Thursday.
ICE has yet to present a radical cause of the change of heart, with spokesman Ross Feinstein curtly telling Ars Technica that “the federal government concluded that the correct and just result was to say no to pursue judicial forfeiture.” RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth, meanwhile, continues to defend the initial seizure, telling Ars that “Dajaz1 profited from its reputation for providing links to pre-release copies, and through that point nearly 2,300 recordings associated with the positioning were faraway from various file-sharing services.”
In retrospect at the case, one can not help but wonder if the guideline of law could have been gravely compromised. First, the govt hoovered up a buffet of domains with an urgency that perceived to imply imminent danger. Then, as opposed to proceeding to the next move, prosecutors simply let the case marinate in an ironclad pot of secrecy, without loads as entertaining a request for adversarial hearings. After apparently realizing it had no evidence to face upon, ICE finally let it drop — but not without branding Dajaz1 as a bastion of copyright criminality, and closing it down for greater than a year.
If Bridges’ account is indeed accurate, this will likely effectively amount to what TechDirt describes as “lawless, unconstitutional, cowboy censorship” — a distinctly Kafkaesque brand of criminal prosecution executed under the guise of jurisprudence. We sincerely hope, for sure, that this is not the tip of the tale. At a time when concerns over federal censorship is reaching a fever pitch , you’d think the govt. would take every precaution to reassure consumers of its commitment to due process, and of the prosecutorial restraint that the Constitution mandates. But unless someone steps in to clear away the clouds of suspicion blanketing Dajaz1, it’s hard to examine these concerns fading away anytime soon.
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