In 2011, the US government grabbed two domains, one .com and one .org, belonging to Spanish sports-TV "linking site" Rojadirecta, claiming that the site was a flagrant enabler of copyright infringement. The government then sought forfeiture of the domains, at which point Rojadirecta's Spanish parent company fought back. A year and a half after the seizure, the government has capitulated—today it dismissed the case against Rojadirecta and will have to return the domains.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been running "Operation In Our Sites" for two years now, obtaining federal seizure orders against US-registered domains believed to be associated with piracy or counterfeiting. Just before Super Bowl Sunday in early 2011, ICE grabbed a new batch of sports-related domains, most of them sites that let people watch live sports on the 'Net. Rojadirecta, one of the big players (no pun intended) in this space, was an obvious target, and ICE acted, replacing the domain names with its own seizure banner. Rojadirecta promptly relocated to rojadirecta.me and continued operations.

The government said, as part of its evidence against the site, that the links to popular and upcoming sporting events on the site's front page were "purposefully aggregated and organized by the owner(s) and/or operators"—no avoiding blame by saying that "the users did it." And "more than half the material available on the Rojadirecta Website at any given time during law enforcement's investigation appeared to be dedicated to making infringing content available"—trying to counter the "only a few links were infringing" argument.

Rojadirecta also framed the content it linked to with its own ads, and the government said that the site's CEO had made "more than $25,000" from Google AdSense between January 2006 and early 2011—hardly a large haul, but evidence that money was being earned on the activity.

But the site owner, a Spanish company called Puerto 80, fought back, hiring US lawyers to represent it in federal court. Among its arguments was the claim that the seizure had been illegal; the law only covered direct infringement, not linking, lawyers said. While Rojadirecta may have "induced" US residents to infringe copyrights, that was a matter for civil law, not criminal law.

The site's attorneys also argued that seizure law itself was far too draconian in these cases. Unlike a drug case, where the cops might seize someone's car to prevent it from being used to transport narcotics, the website was Rojadirecta's entire business. And, also unlike a drug case, the copyright claims here weren't nearly as clear as when police find someone with a brick of heroin in the back seat, which is by definition illegal to possess. Because of the differences, attorneys argued, Rojadirecta should have the chance to defend itself before having its entire operation seized.

The judge disagreed that the penalty was too harsh, noting that the site's servers had not been taken and that Rojadirecta had simply switched domain names and continued in operation.

As the case dragged on, the government dismissed a similar case against hip-hop music blog Dajaz1, the other major seizure target that had decided to fight back. In that instance, the feds kept postponing the case as they waited on the RIAA, only to realize eventually that the evidence they needed wasn't going to materialize.

Today, the government gave up the Rojadirecta fight with a brief court filing that voluntarily dismissed the case but offered few details about why it had done so after battling for over a year. The US Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted the case, provided me with a copy of the cover letter it sent the judge along with the dismissal; that note said only that the case was being dismissed "as a result of certain recent judicial authority involving issues germane to the above-captioned action" and "in light of the particular circumstances of this litigation." The US Attorney's office would not comment further.

After the filing, the judge signed an order today vacating the seizure warrants and ordering Verisign (which controls the .com registry) and The Public Interest Registry (which controls .org domains) both to return the Rojadirecta domains to Puerto 80 "forthwith."

Attorneys for Rojadirecta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The advocacy group Public Knowledge weighed in quickly, however. "Like the unwarranted Dajaz1.com seizures, this case shows that the procedures for seizing domain names are flawed," said Sherwin Siy, vice president of Legal Affairs. "It is far too easy for the government to seize domain names and hold them for an extended period even when it is unable to make a sustainable case of infringement. The constant expansion of copyright enforcement laws has given us a system where website owners are effectively treated as guilty until proven innocent."

ICE boss John Morton said last year that the tactic was effective, and that most sites targeted didn't challenge their seizures/forfeitures. "Frankly unanticipated was the collateral impact of this enforcement action," he said at the time. "According to industry analysis, 81 other sites that had been offering pirated material voluntarily shut themselves down. In my many years in law enforcement, I have not seen that type of deterrence. Indeed, we were advised that seizing these domain names would be the proverbial Whac-a-Mole game with new ones popping up faster than we could obtain court orders. That did not occur."

But those upset about the entire ICE seizure campaign see only overreach in the examples of Dajaz1 and Rojadirecta. Law professor Eric Goldman, one of the first to spot today's filing, took to Twitter to post the news and then to ask, "But will they be held accountable for the improper seizure?"