Has it actually been established that merely linking to copyrighted content is illegal in the United States? I'm not trying to troll, just genuinely curious.
My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.
Is it? I thought all the torrent search engine shut-downs, napster and its ilk, etc., had pretty much proven that linking to illegal content hosts was in fact illegal.
TPB is legal. And they don't even link to copyrighted material, they link to a swarm from which you can git information on where to download copyrighted material.
From a legal aspect, how is this going to last at all? IANAL but I was under the impression most meta-search engines operated in at least a semi-grey area because they don't spoon feed illegal content to you. Most just index the big trackers and (conveniently) don't discriminate between illegal and legal content. I feel like when you are dropping torrents into buckets more specific than "video" and "audio" (e.g. linking multiple torrents to a specific movie, highlighting the HD versions) any conventional argument against aiding copyright infringement is out the window.
Just few years back torrentz was still serving magnet links (just the hash, without trackers embedded), so you didn't even have to visit the torrent sites.
Is even that illegal? Publishing hashes of copyrighted material?
At some level, I would like to see how it goes when one of the anti-piracy groups accidentally codes their piracy-tracking bit-torrent client to join in the torrenting. If they're already involved in the torrenting of their own products... is it illegal anymore? I mean, they're seeding their own data, isn't that like giving permission? "Here's a file, download it!"
However, I don't follow the opposite train of thought.
If linking to copyright infringing material is infringement itself, then it surely must be infringing to link to material that is linking to copyright infringing material? Otherwise Piratebay could just give pointers to 3rd party services that host torrents that point to infringing material. (Well, magnet links could be considered links to torrents that link to warez.)
But that technically leads to a situation where you can't link to any site that could host links (to links) to infringing material. Mention piratebay.org -- oops, a link. Or you previously linked to some site that now has these copyright infringing links. Boom, you're infringing copyright.
That might be nerd's thinking but you really do have to have the line drawn somewhere because laws must generally be well-defined. You can't have a gray area where legality of something depends on the whim of the case. Linking is either illegal or it isn't, and if it's illegal it must be clear what constitutes linking.
Let's say instead of linking to a site that allows you to download copyrighted material, we were talking about linking to a site that allowed you to order a hit on your wife/husband.
These sites don't need any special laws about linking: once law enforcement gets wind of them, they will be gone instantly. All an investigator needs to do is order a hit and then arrest the dude that shows up to execute it. That's the end of that business.
Copyright infringement is hard to enforce because it's peer-to-peer and can happen outside the US' jurisdiction (see TPB). This makes it hard to build a case against someone: uploading 10MB of a movie to someone on the swarm is hardly massive copyright infringement, and if they're outside of the US, you can't do anything anyway. So making linking illegal is their last hope: maybe people won't find the tracker sites and P2P will die.
Not bloodly likely. The links will just move out of the US too.
But torrent files don't aren't in themselves illegal, even if they point to illegal content. TPB doesn't host illegal material. It only hosts the files that point to them. So technically, they're not being illegal.
Does copyright law actually make it illegal (as opposed to just frowned-upon, and maybe hindered by one's ISP) to receive pirated material? I was under the impression that the illegal part was the distribution of it.
So being an illegal content link index (categorized magnet URI lists) is not illegal ? honest question. Isn't that why Google was forced to unlist torrents from results, otherwise they'd be in the same position as TPB.
Trackers in general aren't illegal. You can host a tracker with legal content. You can't host a tracker that serves up zero say scene releases. Just like a router in a sever farm that serves cp is part of an illegal operation.
There is a gray area where you'd host a tracker that serves legal content but some copyrighted material gets through. The DMCA safe harbor should take of that. But most of these torrent frackers are so obviously designed to host pirated stuff that dmca won't cover them.
My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.
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