The US government has taken down more than 70 sites in a sweeping attack on online piracy, according to reports.

The websites were seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the US Department of Homeland Security, and marked a stepping up of the US's war against copyright infringement.

Sites that were affected displayed a landing page notification stating: “This domain has been seized by ICE – Homeland Security Investigations pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court.”

The department has confirmed the action, and threatened more sites could face similar closures in the future.

We hope the relevant authorities will take the appropriate action to ensure that The Pirate Bay ceases its illegal activities

“ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names,” officials said in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time.”

The affected sites were hosted globally, with one such site, Egypt-based Torrent Finder, angered by the lack of transparency of the procedures.

“My web site does not even host any torrents or direct-link to them,” Torrent Finder owner Waleed GadElKareem told the New York Times, adding that he only linked to other sites indirectly via search results.

P2P news site TorrentFreak listed more than 70 sites affected by the action, although many of them appeared have been suspected of trading in fake goods rather than illegal downloads.

Pirate Bay

The news comes as copyright holders were already celebrating victory over the owners of The Pirate Bay website.

The Court of Appeals in Sweden upheld the criminal convictions for copyright infringement against three of the individuals in The Pirate Bay case.

“Now that a Swedish Court has declared the operators of The Pirate Bay guilty of copyright infringement for a second time, we hope the relevant authorities will take the appropriate action to ensure that The Pirate Bay ceases its illegal activities,” said Chris Marcich, managing director of the Motion Picture Association, Europe.

“This confirms that such activities are illegal and if you engage in them, you run the risk of very significant consequences.”

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What right does a US district count have to shutdown a site hosted in Egypt?

My thoughts.

Perhaps because ICANN is pretty much a puppet of the US Dept. of Commerce.

Remember that when the UN was rumoured to be thinking of taking over governance of the IANA function, it elicited howls of protest from the US government and the rumours came to nothing.