From MyCE:
The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided a file sharing site for rap and hip hop music this week after obtaining a search warrant signed by a United States Magistrate.
RapGodFathers had nearly 150,000 members and had been in operation since 2005. DHS and ICE agents raided a Dallas datacenter Tuesday and seized the sites servers, while authorities began the process of taking over the domain name.
But were any of the activities taking place on those servers actually illegal?
“We only link to mixtapes, albums in the hiphop/rap genre,†a senior staff member told TorrentFreak after the raid. “Lots of those mixtapes help new artists become much bigger for example Drake, Chamillionaire, Wiz Khalifa. It also gives the users to listen to an album before buying it to judge the quality. Almost 99% of the time if people on RGF liked the album and posted positive comments, that given artist had a big success.â€
“We ALWAYS removed links connected with any DMCA requests so this is a big surprise to us and our host because we collaborated to get all the links removed asap,†the staff member claims.
The site owners are making attempts to get back online quickly with a new domain name and alternate hosting outside of the United States.
It’s sad that even sites which are supposedly compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are being subjected to this kind of treatment from the government. This is further proof that the country is making progress toward becoming some kind of a police state. Citizens need to start fighting back and voicing opposition to actions like this before its too late.
