US anti-piracy body targets foreign website owners for extradition

by Peter Walker
The Guardian
Jul. 06, 2011

The US's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is targeting overseas websites it believes are breaking US copyrights whether or not their servers are based in America or there is another direct US link, said Erik Barnett, the agency's assistant deputy director.

As long as a website's address ends in .com or .net, if it is implicated in the spread of pirated US-made films, TV or other media it is a legitimate target to be closed down or targeted for prosecution, Barnett said. While these web addresses are traditionally seen as global, all their connections are routed through Verisign, an internet infrastructure company based in Virginia, which the agency believes is sufficient to seek a US prosecution.

As well as sites that directly host or stream pirated material, ICE is also focusing on those that simply provide links to it elsewhere. There remains considerable doubt as to whether this is even illegal in Britain – the only such case to be heard before a British court, involving a site called TV-Links, was dismissed by a judge in February last year.

Barnett's comments follow the case of Richard O'Dwyer, a 23-year-old British student who faces extradition to America for running another popular site, TVShack.net, which provided links to non-licensed streams of films and TV shows. O'Dwyer's family say they are baffled as to why American authorities want to try a British national with no US connection and whose site used servers based elsewhere.

Barnett, who heads ICE's efforts on intellectual property enforcement, said he could not comment on the O'Dwyer case. But in an interview with the Guardian he explained the broader thinking behind it.

"By definition, almost all copyright infringement and trademark violation is transnational. There's very little purely domestic intellectual property theft," he said.

The agency has been running a year-long campaign, Operation In Our Sites, which has thus far "seized" 125 of the most popular unlicensed film, TV and sport websites, including TVShack, as well as ones selling counterfeit physical goods.

Aside from the contravention of US trademarks, website names are central to deciding which are chosen, Barnett said: "The jurisdiction we have over these sites right now really is the use of the domain name registry system in the United States. That's the key."

The only necessary "nexus to the US" is a .com or .net web address for which Verisign acts as the official registry operator, he said.

Decisions on seeking extradition are down to the US department of justice. But Barnett said his agency – which has more than 7,000 criminal investigators – is actively pursuing those within its perceived jurisdiction: "Without wishing to get into the particulars of any case, the general goal of law enforcement is to arrest and prosecute individuals who are committing crimes. That is our goal, our mission. The idea is to try to prosecute."

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