ICE thaws out a seized domain name

A DOMAIN NAME seized by US federal investigators has been returned to its owners after a year of wrangling.

"Homeland Security (ICE, Internet Security and Exclusion) blocked this site for a full year without daring to file a forfeiture proceeding and without daring to reveal its repeated delays in meeting the forfeiture deadline set by law," says a banner the top of the one of the web pages at a hip-hop music blog web site called Dajaz1.com. "Now, after a year of censorship and oppression, it is back."

ICE seized control of that web site's domain name as well as a number of others at the end of November last year, and replaced their usual content with a message reading, "This domain name has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court."

Today the web site is indeed back, and is prominently displaying a warning about SOPA, the US Stop Online Piracy Act. This is not surprising, given the circumstances.

According to a report at Techdirt, the path to a restored web site was not an easy one for Dajaz1, and it took some efforts to overturn the seizure. Fortunately, it seems, the seizure was a sloppy one, and although federal investigators tried hard to keep the web site and its content offline, in the end they had to give up and accept that the seizure was wrong.

At the end of last month US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized 77 domains that it accused of selling counterfeit items and six more that allegedly offered copyright protected material. µ