Mybittorent - Who's your GoDaddy?

I have been watching the MyBittorent.com saga unfold in the last few days. As you might or might not know, GoDaddy took down the aforementioned website on Jan 12th. The story immediately hit digg and became the hot topic of the hour for all tech bloggers.

According to m-ook the take down was due to a complaint from Microsoft that was sent directly to the registrar. This is highly unorthodox. IANAL, but from what I have heard, the take down was not legal under DMCA.

Mybittorent is hosted in Japan, and registered via GoDaddy (based in US). It seems that angry copyright holders could not enforce DMCA abroad so they decided to hit up the registrar. GoDaddy took down the site, and refused the owners to transfer the domain to another registrar without paying a $50 fine.

Shortly after the public outrage broke out, GoDaddy restored MyBittorent and decided to allow them to transfer to another company without any penalty. Why did they suddenly change their position? I'm guessing they did not have any legal basis for their actions.

Still, they lost their credibility and I suspect that most of GoDaddy registered torrent sides are currently in process of switching registrars. They definitely should - I would not trust GoDaddy again after they pulled off this stunt.

This however leads to interesting question regarding the US-centricity of the domain name system. Mybittorent case is a prime example of why US overseeing registration of international domain names might not be such a hot idea. Here we have an US corporation, trying to impose US law (DMCA) upon a foreign website hosted outside US, by attacking the sites US based registrar. This is definitely wrong on more than one level...

Tags: mybittorent, godaddy, digg, dmca, copyright, torrent sites, registrar, godaddy and mybittorent