A federal judge has denied the Spanish company Peurto 80’s motion to release the domains rojadirectica.com and rojadirectica.org, seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Operation In Our Sites.  The seized websites included links to third party websites which illegally streamed copyrighted sports events.  [Click here for the order]

Judge Paul Crotty held that the seizures do not cause “substantial hardship” sufficient to justify releasing the domains, despite a 32% reduction in traffic.  Peurto 80 has moved the sites to other domains, and the company has the ability to “simply distribute information about the seizure and its new domain names to its customers.”

Judge Crotty also rejected Peurto 80’s First Amendment argument that the government suppressed speech by taking down discussion forums: “The main purpose of the Rojadirecta websites, however, is to catalog links to the copyrighted atheletic events – any argument to the contrary is disingenuous.  Although some discussion may take place in the forums, the fact that visitors must now go to other websites to partake in the same discussions is clearly not the kind of substantial hardship that Congfres intened to ameliorate in enacting §983.”

Corryne McSherry, IP Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which submitted a brief with Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology) said in an EFF Deeplinks Blog:

The court’s First Amendment analysis is flatly wrong. Puerto 80 (and EFF) explained to the court that cutting off access to the site also meant cutting off access to clearly legal content, such as discussion forums… The fact that you can get information via a second route does not mean that there is no speech problem with shutting down the first one. In a 1939 case, Schneider v. New Jersey, for example, the Supreme Court held that ‘one is not to have the exercise of his liberty of expression in appropriate places abridged on the plea that it may be exercised elsewhere’.

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