(Black Voices) — When U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) seized hip-hop blogs OnSMASH.com and dajaz1.com last Thursday, we were left asking, “When did rap become a threat to national security?” For ICE it was a matter of copyright infringement, and the same way they’d crack down on a site for selling counterfeit goods, they were cracking down on blogs for posting music and videos. TheBVX contributor Kathy Iandoli points out the absurdity of equating blogs with bootleggers. Remember back in the day when bootleggers sold cassettes in the street? You could purchase one tape for $10, two for $15 or three for $25. The covers were photocopied versions of the original album art, and the images were always stretched, so a bootleg cover of Black Moon’s ‘Enta Da Stage’ made Buckshot Shorty look 6-foot 2. Those were the days. Then we graduated to CDs, with spelling errors all over the place on the discs: Notorius BIG and 2Pak [sic]. (Maybe that’s how Fabolous got his name?) Now that was illegal, and many will recall the day their favorite bootlegger’s stand got shut down by the authorities.
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