In the United States, we've officially gone beyond regulatory capture, to the point where monied interests have entire departments and agencies within the federal government that they can, on a whim, sic on the populace, without any explanation or due process.

I humbly posit that this is a bad thing.

I will be genuinely surprised if any of this survives in court, which is definitely where it's heading.

Ugh. Okay. That is really stupid. I wonder if they'll sieze Google and Bing next? I'm pretty sure you can get some pretty illegal stuff out of them as well!

Whoever managed to get all this extra crap under the jurisdiction of DHS must have gotten a really awesome movie and music collection that year at Christmas!

I wish I shared your optimism with the legal system, but it seems that years of stacking the courts with pro-police-state judges has led to many of these kind of cases ending in favor of governmental overreach.

This is really just laziness on the part of the feds. Instead of doing the actual work involved to find out if infringement is happening, they just lazily seize the domains they're allowed to seize (those registered in the US) and wait for the owners of the site to complain. The real infringers will just register a new domain with a foreign registrar, while the innocent people will almost never have the resources to fight back.

I don't know whether the sites in question were doing anything illegal, and neither does DHS/ICE. It's despicable that presumption of innocence is sacrificed so the RIAA can gain a few more scalps.

It's all fun and games until the RIAA has to pay damages.

I dream of the day when they finally have to face up to all the crap they've pulled and are held fully responsible. Them and their partners in crime - (folks like the MPAA, ACS Law etc - oh yeah, ACS are being investigated :-)