Full Story:
http://www.techspot.com/news/42254-u...fing-more.html

Personally I've used several of the mentioned sites to watch out-of-area NFL games this past season.



Now I know this isn't poker related but if the DOJ & Homeland Security have the time & power to shutdown streaming sports websites in this "Super Bowl Crackdown" you never know if they might attempt an "Online Poker crackdown" or similar. Note that the article mentions how they seized 72 Piracy websites three months ago.

Who knows what these guys are up to next. Even the more reason we all need to be aggressive in getting poker legalized and exempt from these frivolous attacks by our government. I could see them going after sportsbetting sites next and who knows they could lump pokersites into the mix. The intent of this post was not to scare but to remind us we need to stay active in poker legislation now more than ever.

Pigs

Stop insulting pigs.

I don't get it. How does the US Government even have the ability to seize DNS naming registries for internationally hosted sites operating under .com, .net, and .org?

the department of homeland security should have nothing to do with this, from their own site this is the first paragraph of their strategic plan

also fucck the dohs, the doj and the government, always faccking things up, so fukjing sik

atdhe has just moved to a different domain, same site and everything. It appears seizing the domain didn't really have any other teeth behind it.

A very large number of politicians, mostly Democrats but hardly entirely Democrats, got a large amount of campaign contributions from the Entertainment industry.

There is nothing the Entertainment industry hates more than copyright infringement.

So last term Congress passed a new law saying various Government agencies could seize domain names of foreign sites that are involved with copyright infringement. The authorities are interpreting this to include not just sites that provide "illegal" material, but also to sites that link to sites that provide "illegal" material.

In so many ways this is a very dangerous precedent to set in terms of internet freedom. Not because the US should not aggressively pursue true copyright infringement prosecutions, but because it is a clear attempt by the US government to try and establish a worldwide standard for the internet without considering the law in other countries. Traditionally, international treaties are the appropriate way to conduct actions which affect entities in other countries. IOW, what gives the US the legal right to seize the INTERNATIONAL domain name of a site without consideration of whether that site is conducting business in accord with the laws of the country it operates from?

But not only legal authorities in the US want this power, the demand is also often made by the legal authorities in Iran, China, the US state of Kentucky, and a large number of other governments who might not always use this power for "good" reasons.

As a practical matter, however, it still remains to be seen whether the legal authorities of other countries will recognize this new US (or Iranian, etc.) power to take the rights to the intellectual/business property of their citizens operating in compliance with local law. If they do not, nothing short of conquest can force them to comply (just think Iran and its nuclear program).

So if a Domain Name register/provider in the UK decides that it will not let the US seize the domain name of one of its clients, and the UK courts and government back them up, how can the US stop folks from accessing the DN? And of course there are other ways to connect to a site besides the Domain Name.

But so far application of this law is limited solely to intellectual property infringement situations. Poker sites are not subject to this law ... at least at the time of this post.

Skallagrim

Skall, what worries me is that the Obama administration has developed a habit of ignoring court rulings. See the decision by the district court judge in LA that places the administration in contempt of court for violating and ignoring its preliminary injunction against the deep water oil drilling moratorium. Also, since the FL judge declared Obamacare unconstitutional and wrote in his opinion that this declaratory judgment was like an injunction, the Obama administration has promised to continue the implementation of the law.

So who knows what the Obama DOJ will do against online poker? Maybe attempted seizures of poker site domain names is next. I doubt it. I hope not, but nothing would surprise me anymore.

Of course, the Bush administration DOJ started it by ignoring In Re Mastercard and the Antigua WTO decision so this is not new with the Obama administration.

If we don't have a poker bill, a lot of this is in play. And I would not hold my breath waiting for the courts to strike it down.

(By the way, the notion that the US government can regulate commercial websites directed into the United States is expressed in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution. So there's nothing THEORETICALLY wrong with the government taking actions to stop infringement of US copyrights directed to US residents from abroad. The problem is that copyright law is a one-way ratchet-- it seems to be constantly expanding, leaving less and less activities and expression in the public domain.)

Lol entertainment industry, they realize like most other businesses that they are ****** and they will never see profits like they did in the past. This kind of **** is going down everywhere, people trying to squeeze every last drop of money out of whatever declining industry they are in.

Great, now how am I supposed to watch the Super Bowl online. I've tried googling it but I just get ads for all those crappy online streaming TV software scams.

They don't actually stream it on Fox or whatever? Why wouldn't they stream it for free just like on basic TV, ads and all?

Someone should make a trademark out of this sentence.

I always wondered this myself. Not just the SB, but any show already offered on free TV. I think most of the networks are showing their shows for free, but it's after the show airs, like at 3 am. I'm guessing it has to do with bandwith and all that.

I don't know why people in charge of these entertainment outlets, just don't get that someday all you will need to get anything is access to the internet and a smartphone. Of course those days are still way off in the future, like in three months or so.

One reason they don't stream most live events or put up video of all shows (sometimes just for a limited time)on a network is becasue of local affiliates. These local stations have agreements with the networks for content and make most of their revenue running ads while airing this content.

Another reason is advertisers who pay top dollar for ads during a shows air time may not want that content available on the net, sure they can use the same ads but then that brings up the issue of the local ads the affilites would run.

Hulu has had this problem and why they can't get all shows on all networks and had to start to offer a premium payed service. They continue to have problems with advertisers and affiliates even though they get a piece of the pie.

It looks like it should be a no brainer to us and something easily done, but in the real business world doing it is much more difficult.

Thanks for the info. Like Leno, I hadn't thought about the local affiliates.

Ah yea, the trouble with an outdated, inflexible system, right?

I won't pretend to know much about it, but seems like something not set in the stone age could've adapted to new technology by now.

Also, the internet is an anonymous packet system with multiple redundancies. These attempts are only effective on US domiciled ISPs or domain registries, such as GoDaddy. There is no easy way to filter the internet.

While this is OT, this sentence is 100% false.