American Government Took Offline Music Sharing Services

The Department of Justice and Immigration and Customs Enforcement continue their Operation in Our Sites campaign. It is known that within the recent days, large music sharing websites – RockDizFile.com and RockDizMusic.com – were shut down. Like many other victims of the authorities before, their domains now point to a prominent seizure banner.

It was four and a half years ago that the US authorities launched their campaign to take copyright infringing services offline, dubbed “Operation in Our Sites”. Since then, the campaign has resulted in thousands of domain name seizures and a number of arrests. While most of the websites are linked to counterfeit products, the operation also targeted dozens of “pirate” websites.

Recently, it was a period of relative calm, as no sites were targeted within the last several months. But now it seems that the authorities have restarted their efforts with the closure of two large music websites. Two connected services, RockDizFile.com and RockDizMusic.com, now display familiar banners that claim that it was ICE who took them offline.

In the meantime, Twitter and Facebook pages of both services show no sign of a trouble and have remained silent for days. RockDizMusic website positioned itself as an index of popular new music. The musicians were encouraged to use the online portal to promote their work, but it is known that the website also featured music that was shared without copyright holders’ permission, including pre-release tracks. Its fellow, RockDizFile, featured a more classic file-hosting look, but it was generally used for music because of its 50MB limit. The website offered premium accounts, whose owners were able to add storage space and remove limitations of the file size and bandwidth.

The interesting fact is that both portals had a strong focus on rap and hip-hop music, as well as the previous ICE seizures: RapGodFathers.com, RMX4U.com, OnSmash.com and Dajaz1.com. However, the latter seems to have been seized by mistake, because the copyright lawsuits failed to deliver proof of alleged infringements to the authorities. As a result, the domain was returned to its operators after a long appeal.

Both lawmakers and legal scholars have repeatedly criticized the ICE’s practices in terms of the Operation in Our Sites, both because of that incident and the general lack of due process. However, the authorities decided to continue Operation in Our Sites.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement claimed that actions under the “Operation in Our Sites” investigate and develop evidence to obtain seizure warrants from federal judges, cooperating with the US Department of Justice to prosecute, convict, and punish people and seize domains, profits, and other property from IP thieves.

In the recent case, it is unknown whether ICE has targeted any of the operators of the seized RockDizFile.com and RockDizMusic.com. It is also unclear whether the authorities have taken down any other websites in a similar way.