Homeland Security versus your European domain name

Image via WikipediaHere's an article from TechDirt that should give all European (if not global) digital marketers reason to sit up an notice.

Rojadirecta is a Spanish sports streaming site. It's had its time in court, over copyright matters but the Spanish courts found the Spanish site to be legal. In Spain the law makes sense. If you point to copyright material - such as link to it - you're not breaking the law.

That's not the case around the world. In a strange turn of events the American authorites - the Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, has seized Rojadirecta's domain. This is a Spanish site, run by a Spanish company in Spain and governed by Spanish laws. Rojadirecta does not host any content itself. It just points to it. You know; in the way a search engine might do.

At this point, I'm not clear how ICE were able to do this. I assume some registrar, somewhere, decided to cave in than face an angry Homeland Security.