Nominet takes down 32,000 domains for IP infringement

The number of .uk domains suspended by Nominet has doubled over the last year, almost entirely due to takedown requests concerning intellectual property.

The .uk registry said this week that it suspended 32,813 domains in the 12 months to October 31, up from 16,632 in the year-ago period.

It’s the fourth year in a row that the number of suspensions has more than doubled. In 2014, it was a paltry 948.

While Nominet has trusted notifier relationships with 10 law enforcement agencies, it’s the Police Intellectual Property Crimes Unit that is responsible for almost all of the takedown requests, 32,669 this year.

No court order or judicial review is required. Nominet simply carries out unspecified “administrative checks” then suspends the domain.

Only 114 domains did not make the cut this year, Nominet said, but that’s up considerably from 32 last year.

There’s an appeals mechanism that can be used by registrants to restore their domains, for example if they’ve removed the infringing content. It was used successfully 16 times in the year, up by one on last year.

The registry also reported that no domains were suspended due to its ban on incitement-to-rape domains, down from two last year, but that staff had to manually review 2,717 new registrations containing suspect strings.

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Tagged: .uk, censorship, copyright, nominet, piracy, suspensions