We interrupt this idyllic Saturday morning for a rant against… who else? Big Brother.

Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield – unless you’re ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is.

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

TorrentFreak

There’s a list of domains/sites at TorrentFreak that have been shut down by our government. No notice, simply grabbed through ICANN.

If Big Sis is going to start seizing domains and shutting down sites that not only carry illegal content but point the way to sites that distribute it, then they should go after search engines!

They’re getting a head start on COICA, which was approved by a Senate committee and is not even law yet… so watch what you say about the stupid government! Oh, and if you’ve ever been to a torrent site or a site that points to one, your ISP will probably have to give all your activity to the government, so you’re screwed too.

Bloody government. I don’t download from torrents; frankly don’t even know how they work, but if the music industry didn’t simply rent out music that we supposedly buy, crippling us with DRM, maybe people would buy more instead of stealing. The industry is killing itself.

Good luck explaining your heavy handed actions to the overseas sites, Big Sis.

Good grief. Are the RIAA and MPAA members big Dem donors?

Kudos to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who vows to stop the COICA.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA, S.3804) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. It passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 19-0 this week, but it’s never going to pass the Senate before the end of the current Congress.

That’s due to resistance from people like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who announced at a separate trade hearing of his own yesterday that he was going to “take the necessary steps to stop [COICA] from passing the United States Senate.”