US Federal Judge Denies Appeal to Return Streaming Domains

Dees Illustration

James Lee Phillips
International Business Times

A United States Federal judge has given a seal of approval to the summary seizure of foreign websites.

Rojadirecta may or may not have been a pirate website; that was not the issue that was decided upon on Thursday. The issue before the court was whether Puerto 80, the Spanish-based owner of the Rojadirecta.com and org websites, would be getting their property (the domain names) returned — and therefore whether the seizure of a website violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

On Thursday, about two months after Puerto 80’s official petition, District Court Judge Paul Crotty ruled that no such violation had occurred, and that the company had seen ‘no substantial economic hardship’ from the loss of its main Internet sites — a key element in the return of seized property. Fundamentally, the judge’s opinion was that visitors could simply ‘go somewhere else’.

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