« Ind. Gov't. - "Is Roe v. Wade Deadletter Law?" | Main | Ind. Gov't. - More on: Big day today in the General Assembly »

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Courts - Continuing on with: "Kentucky Supreme Court to hear online gambling case"

Remember this ILB entry from March 19, 2010? The Governor of Kentucky had seized 141 Internet domain names of online gambling sites. There was outrage.

On April 15, 2011, however, the U.S. DOJ seized the domain names of "Poker Stars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker and charged the site principals with bank fraud, illegal gambling offenses and laundering billions in illegal gambling proceeds," according to this entry from DomainNameNews.com.

Today a WSJ story reports that: "Prosecutors seized five Internet domain names used by the companies last week: pokerstars.com, fulltiltpoker.com, absolutepoker.com, ultimatebet.com and ub.com."

Nate Silver of the NY Times column FiveThirtyEight, reports today that "After ‘Black Friday,’ American Poker Faces Cloudy Future." The lengthy and comprehensive report gives the history of online poker, and includes links to the indictment and complaint.

Finally, another domain name blog, TheDomains.com, posted April 16th under the heading "Why Is Anyone Surprised Over Yesterday’s Gambling Domain Seizures & Why No Publicly Traded Company Got Charged":

We know that the government is getting quite comfortable in seizing domain names, a law enforcement practice that simply didn’t exist just a couple of years ago.

I think this practice can be traced directly back to the Governor of Kentucky who seemed to be the 1st to come up with the idea that domain names could and should be seized. (that case is STILL pending).

Since then, we have had the Feds seize domains for alleged violations of copyright laws and sales of counterfeit goods.

It seems that the US government is on an unstoppable march to seize domain names upon the allegation of an ever expanding list of offenses.

Not upon conviction but upon the filing of charges.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 21, 2011 09:16 AM
Posted to Courts in general