Victory for Piracy: Sloppy US government wrongly lists harmless Putlocker website as pirate site

In July, the United States government had arrested Kickass Torrents founder Artem Vaulin to secure the first major breakthrough in the war against online piracy. However, it seems that the Obama administration has lost some vigour as it has wrongly accused a benign Vietnamese website of hosting illegal file sharing.

Earlier this week, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) mistook putlocker.ch as the notorious putlockers.ch and branded it as a pirate site, though, it does not infringe any copyrights.

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Though USTR is at fault of committing a faux pas, Marshall Domains LTD, which owns putlocker.ch, is partly guilty as well. In a bid to drive-in traffic to its site, it has purchased such a domain name.

The company has commenced taking steps to evade enforcement measures. Once satisfied with the argument, the US government is expected to lift the restriction on putlocker.ch and block the original Putlockers website, which recently changed its domain from Iceland (.is) to Switzerland (.ch). It has been using the reverse proxy services to conceal the location of its hosting provider.

Besides the gaffe, USTR is also accused of doing sloppy work. Without conducting proper verification, it has listed numerous domain names that have long been defunct as the world's most notorious piracy sites.

For instance, novamov.com, divxstage.to, videoweed.es and movshare.net, which have changed their domain names several months (some even close to a year) back, are still named in USTR's list, Torrents Freak reported.

It's high time, USTR pulls up their socks up or risk losing the battle against online piracy.