The Alphaville Herald

US Government Hits 73,000 Blogs With Ban Stick

by Alphaville Herald on 19/07/10 at 11:46 am

by IntLibber Brautigan

In a blatant show of force against a host of more than 73,000 wordpress blogs, the US Government ordered BurstNet Technologies to take down the server of Blogetery.com for repeated acts of abuse of intellectual property and insufficient respect for the DMCA. According to a story on TorrentFreak, the owner/renter of the server received the following notice from BurstNet: "

Due to the history of abuse and on going abuse on this ‘bn.***********’ server.

We have opted to terminate this server, effective immediately. This termination applies to: bn.affiliateplex.com

Abuse Department
BurstNET Technologies, Inc"

Herald readers will note that the governments ban notice sounds much like the sort of banhammer notice that some less than above board members of SL have received in the past – as well as some innocent residents. Given the extensive abuse of intellectual property in SL, could the other shoe may finally be dropping on Linden Lab’s abysmal and often capricious DMCA enforcement in Second Life?

Consider the number of what could be Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, Harry Potter, NFL, MLB, Michael Jackson, and do we need mention, Marvel and DC Comics, copyright violations occuring in Second Life  — then wonder how soon it will be before Linden Lab gets a similar takedown notice from its internet service providers. The situation is complicated by illicit third party SL clients capable of "securing" backups of user owned content, regardless of creator permissions – while spoofing themselves as approved clients.

Blogetery.com has a rather notorious record of hosting blogs of rather blatant software and other IP piracy operations, providing links to download the latest video games, hollywood blockbusters, and music MP3s. While it claims it maintains a policy of timely response to DMCA filings, their timeliness evidently had not satisfied the demands of the federal government. It surely wasn’t like they were being punished for hosting, say, certain SL related weblogs.

It stands to reason that not ALL of the 73,000 blogs on Blogetery.com were involved in piracy, but the innocent were swept away with the guilty as everyone lost the entirety of their blog content. It is well established that the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from exacting collective guilt on people merely for being customers of a company that provided services to criminals, so this case may wind up in the courts – at least for the legitimate bloggers who want their data back. Apparently BurstNet is under orders not to release the data on the server in question to anybody, which leads us to wonder if any newsy WikiLeaks content originating in the middle east may have been on that server, but at this point we can only speculate.