This is perhaps the most naive statement I have ever read on Hacker News. Domain seizures don't have temporary consequences, and law enforcement knows this. Once they've seized the domain, they've done all the damage they need to do. Everything else is just window dressing. Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead.
As much as prosecutors would love to, we don't put people to death before they are found guilty. We should not allow the equivalent to happen to websites without giving them the opportunity to present counterarguments to a judge. They should be given notice that the domain is going to be seized, and arguments should be scheduled. Domain seizures are far too easy to obtain given that they mean the absolute and total destruction of the target business, without recourse, regardless of the ultimate outcome of any trial. That is hardly fair and certainly not the way the US system of "justice" is supposed to operate.
Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead.
I find that difficult to believe. If tomorrow, the people behind MegaUpload were released, and their assets were released, and they were told they could go back to running MegaUpload as they had done so, I suspect they would, and the users would flock back to it.
Your claim is that websites require unique protection with regards to seizures. I have difficulty granting that, because if you seize all of the assets of any business, that business is, at the least [1], temporarily on hold. So, unless you can provide an argument for why websites are unique, then the process you propose would have to apply to all businesses. I have difficulty with that.
[1] I mean "at the least" literally, as a lower-bound. I don't want to get into a side argument about the likely fate of MegaUpload, since my point is that MegaUpload's fate is no different from that of other businesses.
I think an argument can be made that domains do require special protection. Web-based businesses are living, breathing entities that are permanently damaged when offline. Simply look at the before/after traffic statistics of the few sites that have been wrestled back from the claws of the government after seizure. The sites are dead.
The real world equivalent of domain seizure isn't temporarily restraining a business from certain questionable activities. It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty. If they are found not guilty, then, after more legal wrangling, they'll get the empty lot back. They are then "free" to resume their former operation.
It's more like shutting down a restaurant for sanitation violations.
If they open up, they might have trouble getting business if everyone thinks there are probably still rat turds in the food. So they need to advertise, maybe "change management", maybe change the name.
Who cares if the old domain is dead, if a new one can be set up that runs the same way and is just as popular?
It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty.
I find that characterization both hyperbolic and inaccurate. An analogy I am much more comfortable with is seizing a business's physical store, locking the doors and keeping the key during the trial. I'm more comfortable with it because it smells like the kind of analogy a judge would make when interpreting how existing laws should apply to the internet.
So, can you provide an argument for why seizing the physical building is okay, while seizing the domain and servers is not okay? If you cannot, then what you propose would have to also apply to physical buildings, which means you're proposing a fundamental change to how seizures work before a criminal trial.
The logic behind unannounced seizures is valid. If announcement was given and MU were violating the law, it's reasonable to believe they would immediately take action to obfuscate and obscure any evidence against them. It is also likely there is little to no physical evidence against them, and as we all well know, electronic evidence can easily be disposed of without trail.
Corporations are not people, and by seizing assets and personnel the authorities have committed no murder. If anything MU has now become a household name and I find it very hard to believe their business would simply vanish overnight if acquitted.
By the time these seizures occur, they have already collected all of the evidence they can from their public website, and there is nothing that would preclude the government from serving search warrants prior to serving notice of a domain seizure.
As to your comment about Corporations not being people...may I introduce you to Corporate Personhood. According to Wikipedia....
Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations under the law, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person.....
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a headnote—not part of the opinion—the reporter noted that the Chief Justice began oral argument by stating, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."
Yes, corporate personhood is a useful legal construct so that you can do business with a company, and not just a person within a company. It doesn't mean a corporation is a person who can be killed by bankruptcy or who can marry or vote.
If you sold 10,000 widgets to FooCorp you don't want FooCorp to claim your contract was really with one specific person within FooCorp that is no longer there. If they do something wrong, you want to be able to sue FooCorp and not its 67123 employees.
