Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN has joined forces with the MPAA and effectively shut down 29 BitTorrent, Usenet and file sharing websites.
Unlike the recent US Homeland Security seizures, this shutdown was more traditional, with the website hosts complying with BREIN and MPAA demands to redirect the hosted websites to the BREIN website. The US seizures, on the other hand, included seizing the actual ownership of the domain names.
But in both cases, the owners of the websites were not alerted to the seizure, nor has there been any legal document that can be obtained by the party charged with providing or linking pirated material. It's this lack of due process that has made such operations so controversial.
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Unlike the recent US Homeland Security seizures, this shutdown was more traditional, with the website hosts complying with BREIN and MPAA demands to redirect the hosted websites to the BREIN website. The US seizures, on the other hand, included seizing the actual ownership of the domain names.
But in both cases, the owners of the websites were not alerted to the seizure, nor has there been any legal document that can be obtained by the party charged with providing or linking pirated material. It's this lack of due process that has made such operations so controversial.
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