http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/us-judge-orders-hundreds-of-sites-de-indexed-from-google-twitter-bing-facebook.arsQuote:
Luxury goods maker Chanel has convinced a judge to order the seizure of hundreds of Internet domain names and to order the names blocked from "all" search engines and social media networks. [...]
Yet more evidence that the clowns in Washington shouldn't be given power over DNS and search engines. I hope Google, et al promptly tells this judge to go **** himself. They aren't even a party to this farce of a lawsuit.
I, for one, am still pressing the fight against SOPA and PROTECT IP, but Balasubramani (quoted at the end of the article) makes an apt observation:
Quote:
An injunction requiring Google to "de-list" sites is one remedy which SOPA expressly makes available, and ordering the registry to transfer domain names to GoDaddy and ordering GoDaddy to update the DNS records is in effect achieving another remedy which SOPA creates. The fight against SOPA may be a red herring in some ways, since IP plaintiffs are fashioning very similar remedies in court irrespective of the legislation. Thus, even if SOPA is defeated, it may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory--opponents may win the battle but may not have gained much as a result.
It's important that SOPA and PROTECT IP get defeated, but it's not enough. Existing IP law is already a god-awful mess of contradictions and overly-broad "protections" for IP holders. It's rife for abuse as is, but this is compounded by a judiciary that is largely technologically incompetent and all too willing to accommodate scattershot placeholder lawsuits like this. It's disgusting that they'll even entertain these lawsuits where there's not even an attempt to identify a single defendant. Even sweeping blatant jurisdictional problems aside, this thoroughly short-circuits any chance for the defendants to, you know, ... actually defend themselves in court and face their accuser. Apparently due process need not apply when it's CyberCrime(TM). Computers are scary, if you haven't heard.