The US Department Of Justice has confirmed it recently seized six domain names used by music piracy sites, seemingly as part of the Operation 404 anti-piracy initiative being run out of Brazil.
It was confirmed last week that 226 websites and 461 apps had been targeted in the latest phase of Operation 404, in which Brazilian police and the country’s Ministry Of Justice have collaborated with cyber and IP crime experts in both the US and the UK.
For its part, the US DoJ seized the domains associated with six sites that made available unlicensed music, those being Corourbanos.com, Corourbano.com, Pautamp3.com, SIMP3.com, flowactivo.co and Mp3Teca.ws. The first four, by using dot com addresses, were all registered with a US-based registry, while the latter two were administered by a US-based registrar.
In a statement, the DoJ said: "Law enforcement identified these six domains as being used to distribute copyrighted material without the authorisation of the copyright holders. A law enforcement investigation confirmed that copyright-protected music content was present and available for streaming or downloading on each of these six websites from the Eastern District Of Virginia".
"The seizure of these six domains by the government", it added, "will prevent third parties from streaming and downloading copyright-protected content from these sites. Individuals visiting those sites now will see a message indicating that the site has been seized by the federal government, and visitors will be redirected to another site for additional information”.