In a move timed to disrupt illegal retail activity on “cyber Monday,” the government has executed seizure orders against 82 domain names of websites selling counterfeit goods or enabling illegal file-sharing, the DOJ announced today. But some of the websites whose URLs were seized last week have already migrated to new web addresses, and are back up and running.The seizures were part of Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0, in which law enforcement agents made undercover purchases from the websites. If the goods were determined to be counterfeit, warrants were delivered to the registries that control the top-level domains, and traffic to the web addresses was then rerouted to another server, displaying a government message. Operation in Our Sites v. 1.0 was announced in June, and targeted sites selling pirated first-run movies. But the latest URL raid hit a wider range of websites. Among them were websites selling and facilitating the sharing of movies, music and software, as well as others selling sports equipment, shoes, handbags, athletic apparel and sunglasses. (Last week, the website Torrent Freak compiled a partial list of the seized URLs.)
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