Owners of sites with illegal content in .COM and .NET zones face court in the USA
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Anyone who conducts illegal activities (for example, distributing materials protected by copyright law) on sites registered in .com or .net zones can be extradited to the United States because these domain zones are managed by an American company.
This is terrific news from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Agency, which requires the owner of the TVShack.net website, who lives in England, to stand trial in the United States. According to The Guardian , 22-year-old student Richard O'Dyer is accused of copyright infringement. Interestingly, on his site there were only links to download pirated films and TV shows, and not the videos themselves. The laws of Great Britain do not give a clear answer to the question of whether it is a crime to post links to pirated content.Agency Assistant Director Eric Barnett said that any overseas website located in .com or .net zones where pirated material is distributed is subject to prosecution in the United States. Barnett also drew attention to the fact that the violation of intellectual property is a crime on an international scale, and that the offender and the server on which his site is located in another country cannot be an excuse. Therefore, the Agency will do its best to stop copyright infringement on the Internet.
The agency has already begun to close torrent tracker sites in .com and.net zones by hijacking their domains, even if the contentious sites were recognized as legal in the country of the hosting country.
The agency served a court order with VeriSign, the .com and .net domain administrator based in Virginia. The company, of course, is obliged to execute the court decision.
The site was not hosted on American hosting, and O'Dyer was never in the United States. The only link is the domain name.
This case could set a completely crazy precedent. Now everyone who plans to register their own domain will have to pay attention to who is the administrator of a particular domain zone. Most of them are American companies, but recently many new registries have appeared in Europe, Asia and Australia, and some of these countries also have rather strange laws.