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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Incorrect. Many cases are handled in civil courts, not by law enforcement.
Law enforcement often goes after physical counterfeiters, not online piracy. E.g. the US seized a bunch of domains in... 2009? and the overwhelming majority sold knock-off apparel, and only a few were involved in digital IP infringement.
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There's a number of interesting cases where ICE seized websites, held them for awhile (sometimes as long as a year), and then returned them without any explanation. Several of those sites seemingly had nothing to do with IP infringement or counterfeiting, and the seizure process was incredibly secretive. Dajaz1.com is the goto case on this, where the US government seized the site for a year on claims (that turned out to be without substance) by the RIAA. Here's a particularly amusing/scary quote from Dajaz1's lawyers:
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The owner of Dajaz1.com appreciates the fact that the United States Government, on studying the matter further with all the information the RIAA could furnish, determined that there was in fact no probable cause to seek a forfeiture of the domain it had seized and held for a year.
That exoneration, however, did not remedy the harms caused by a full year of censorship and secret proceedings — a form of “digital Guantanamo” — that knocked out an important and popular blog devoted to hip hop music and has nearly killed it.
The original seizure was unjustified. The delay was unjustified. The secrecy in extensions of the forfeiture deadlines was unjustified.
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You'll have to take the above with a grain of salt of course, since it's from the site's lawyer, so not exactly unbiased. Other sources have indicated that the process used to seize the site and extend that seizure were quite secretive, often involving the sealing of court records and the site's lawyers not being served with notice of proceedings. It's a pretty bizarre/worrying case on the face of it.