U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

[Claude Almansi]

Apart from the oddities noted by Marc Rontenberg in:

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Marc Rotenberg <rotenberg at epic.org> wrote:
> According to the New York York Times, it was the Dept of
> Homeland Security (the same agency that brought us
> airport body scanners) that seized the BitTorrent site and others.
> This seems odd since it is the US Dept of Justice that would
> typically investigate copyright matters.
>
> Note also that this action took place prior to Senate action
> on COICA.
>(...
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/technology/27torrent.html
>
> U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown
> By BEN SISARIO
> Published: November 26, 2010
>(...)

The seizure notice in <http://torrent-finder.com/> looks a bit
strange, and if you check the source, the page content boils down to:

<div align="center"><img src="IPRC_Seized_2010_11.jpg" width="1024"
height="768" border="0"></div>

and a bunch of scripts.

Now - however immoral the US policy may be copyright-wise, one thing
US gov. agencies do is respect web accessibility guidelines. Banging
an image of text like said
<http://torrent-finder.com/IPRC_Seized_2010_11.jpg> on a page without
alternative description does not comply with these guidelines as
screen readers used by the blind and print-disabled cannot make head
or tail of such an image. The only thing a screen reader would read on
that page would be "This domain name has been seized by ICE dash
Homeland Security Investigations dash Internet Explorer", according to
the Fangs extension of Firefox.

Could this not rather be a demo by torrent-finder.com and other
torrent search services against what new copyright enforcement might
do, rather than an actual copyright enforcement measure?

Just wondering

Claude