Sen Ron Wyden promises hard questions over US Customs Enforcement's secret seizure of domain names

By Cory Doctorow at 5:54 am Monday, Dec 12

Senator Ron Wyden's staffers have promised a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the DHS over its program of seizing domains it believes to be implicated in copyright infringement. ICE's domain-seizure program made news this week when the Kafkaesque tale of dajaz1.com, a hiphop site that posted music that it received from record labels for that purpose, became widely known. Dajaz1.com's owners and their lawyers were never allowed to see the evidence against them, or contest the charges, because ICE conducted its entire case against the site in secret. A year later, it released the domain without apology, saying the "forfeiture was unwarranted."

"I expect the administration will be receiving a series of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests from our office and that the senator will have very pointed questions with regard to how the administration chooses to target the sites that it does," said Jennifer Hoelzer, a Wyden spokeswoman. She said the senator was "particularly interested in learning how many secret dockets exist for copyright cases. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious precedent or explanation for that."

Wyden’s interest comes a day after federal authorities returned the domain name dajaz1.com, which was back online greeting visitors Friday with a powerful message about proposed web-censorship legislation that expands the government—and copyright holders—power to shutter and cripple sites suspected of copyright infringement.

Wyden is also the senator leading the charge against the Stop Online Piracy Act, which will institutionalize the powers ICE arrogated to itself in the Dajaz1.com seizure, streamlining them and extending them to cover payment processors and advertising brokers, and giving them to entertainment companies to exercise directly, without any need to have government agencies do work on their behalf.

Senator Wyden wants answers from DHS over domain name seizures Tags: Copyfight, free speech, law, sopa, web theory

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MetaMaus: the secret history of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning Maus

More than a quarter-century since its inital publication, Maus, Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel history of his father's Holocaust experience, is still counted as one of the seminal documents in the history of comics, of memoir, and of Holocaust stories.

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus, just released, is an in-depth look at the art, the psychology, the history and the politics of Maus. It consists primarily of a long interview with Speigelman, in which he describes the artistic influences he took to his task, the artistic challenges he met, the familial frustrations he dealt with in interviewing his father, the political, social and professional fallout from Maus's success, and many other subjects.

Spiegelman is well-spoken and insightful, and is one of those rare creators who can talk coherently about his own work and process. His recollections and analysis are complemented by interviews with his wife and children, as well as a transcript of some of his original interviews with his father. MetaMaus is thoroughly illustrated with excerpts from Spiegelman's sketchbook, from the original source materials he used when creating his book, and news clippings and other ephemera from the books' storied history.

The book is accompanied by a DVD with about 4GB of video and audio, including the interview that makes up the book, the original interviews with Speigelman's father, and several videos and images of the source material. The DVD nominally requires a Mac or PC to view, and the media files are hidden on the disk, which makes it hard to move the MP3s of the audio to your portable player. I solved this by creating a disk image of the DVD, which made all the files visible again. I'm looking forward to listening to the interviews on the move.

Mark blogged the book's trailer last month, and it gives a good sense of how gripping and smart the book and DVD are. Tweet This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 6:27 am and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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