Domain Registrars Deny Police Requests to Suspend Pirate Sites

Domain name suspension requests sent by City of London Police to registrars are not being met with cooperation in a majority of cases. New information obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveals that a total of 70 requests were denied, with just five being granted.

cityoflondonpoliceEarlier this week City of London Police arrested the alleged operator of a range of proxy sites. The action was framed as a success but new information obtained by TorrentFreak shows that other police anti-piracy efforts are far less effective.

“Operation Creative” began with the sending of warning letters to site owners, asking them to go legit or shut down. Late last year this was followed by a campaign targeted at domain registrars, asking them to suspend the domain names of several “illegal” sites.

“If a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar informing them of the criminality and seeking suspension of the site,” the City of London Police told TorrentFreak.

To find out more about the scope of this operation, back in June TorrentFreak sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the police which provided new insights into the effectiveness of this process.

Following its launch in the last quarter of 2013, City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) sent warning letters to the operators of 107 ‘pirate’ sites. All of these sites were referred by entertainment industry groups, and include most of the popular file-sharing domains.

Interestingly, the FOI data further reveals that 109 domain names were referred to PIPCU in total, which means that the police didn’t take any action against two of the reported sites. There are no additional details explaining why these sites were not considered to be infringing.

In addition to contacting site owners directly, PIPCU also approached domain name registrars with requests to suspend these pirate sites. In total the police sent out suspension requests for 75 domain names, and only five of these were granted. The other 70 requests were denied.

This relatively low success rate of less than 7% shows that domain registrars are not easily convinced to suspend accounts without a court order. The only registrar that we know of who did comply was PDR Ltd (Public Domain Registry), who seized ExtraTorrent’s domain name and several others.

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