British Police Took Down MP3 Search Engine

The UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit seized a domain name of the well-known search engine MP3Juices. After yet another suspension, the owners of the service get ready for the worst and are looking for a new domain name.

The City of London Police has been actively cooperating with rights owners over the past few months in an attempt to topple websites providing or linking to pirated material. British cops started with sending out notifications to website operators to ask them to either go legit or seize their operations. Back in 2013, a campaign targeted at domain registrars followed, where the police demanded them to suspend the domain names of a number of “infringing” websites.

Although many registrars have denied such demands due to lack of any legal basis, some of them decided to cooperate. For example, a few days ago just another site fell victim to the police’s campaign: MP3Juices lost its domain name and there is little hope to get it back.

MP3Juices was quite popular, accounting for more than a million visitors per month. At the moment, all of them have to search the web for an alternative, because the website of the service now displays a prominent police banner saying that the site is under criminal investigation for online copyright infringement.

The domain of MP3Juices was suspended by its domain name registrar Internet.bs. The same company has previously suspended the domains of a number of other portals, including Cricfree.tv. The interesting part is that Cricfree.tv received a permission to transfer its domain to another registrar after threatening the registrar to take legal steps.

Looking at the trend, owners of the alleged pirate websites are now looking for safe heavens and new registrar who won’t give in to complaints from the UK authorities. One of them is the Canadian registrar EasyDNS, because it is known for fiercely protesting PIPCU’s efforts. The police are trying to insist by sending the registrar a threatening letter, claiming that the company itself could be held liable for refusal to cooperate.

The industry experts suggest that bypassing registrars altogether may become a new trend for the services like MP3Juices. Indeed, cutting out the registrar and going directly to the TLD’s registry is the best way, because the latter would normally only respond to a court order, not threats from police.