Popular rap websites Onsmash.com and Rapgodfathers.com have been shut down by the feds in what appears to be linked to a wide-reaching federal crackdown on online piracy of music and movies. The two sites were popular with Hip-Hop heads as go-to destinations to download new music.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, seized the sites on Friday along with a handful of other torrent sites and replaced them with a notice that read: “This domain name has been seized by ICE – Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court.”
According to the New York Times:
“Among the domains seized were torrent-finder.com and those of three sites that specialized in music: onsmash.com, rapgodfathers.com and dajaz1.com. TorrentFreak, a news blog about BitTorrent – a file-sharing system that has tended to elude the authorities because it is decentralized – said that at least 70 other addresses had been seized, most belonging to sites related to counterfeit clothing, DVDs and other goods.”
Expect sites like On Smash to come back in some form or fashion because shortly after news broke @OnSmash tweeted this:
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