Pirate bay court case

Basher said:
They are in control of the torrents that get put up onto the site. And the torrent points to the copyrighted material.

It's not the same at all as prosecuting a gun shop for murder using weapons they sold.
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Torrent does not point anywhere; torrent is simply a hash file. And the tracker tells people of other people with that same hash file; at no point is there a link between the torrent files and the actual data they serve really.

The law and legal definitions have to be stretched because of the way the system works and the fact the law is about 20 years out of date; the problem is ... now that you've stretched the definition you have to go after Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and so on because they all link to copyrighted material in some way or form.
 
Basher said:
It's not the same. TPB linked only torrents and most of those illegal. Google searches the entire web, this includes torrents.

TPB is much more focused on torrents and condones the illegal downloading of them.
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Don't you see it is exactly the same if anything google links to more as it indexes lots of sites and personal files. How can a site as big as TPB check all the files? Just because someone may put up a torrent of say 'Blockbuster Game AAA The Best Ever' doesn't neccessarily mean that is what the person is downloading.

With google you can search for anything with .torrent and it'll directly give you the torrent no matter if that's hosted on a persons PC (obviously as long as it's index'd it).



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
They probably do but don't tell anyone about it so no one is the wiser. It wouldn't suprise me if they have been doing this for years as ISP's are a law unto themselves (take the Phorm trials for example - basically testing this on users without there permission).

Whatever you do on the internet is recorded somewhere - you just have to be as secure as possible and use encrypted websites.


M.
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That somewhere would be your history and cookies etc...

I'm wondering if the ISPs themselves have records.
 
m4cc45 said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay

I still believe it's in operation. I remember reading somewhere that v8.2 of iTunes reactivated some DRM or such like. I can't find it at the moment but I'll try and dig out the link.



M.
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I'd be interested to see this link, 8.2 isn't out yet, AFAIK 8.1.1 is the current version? There is definitely no DRM in the few songs I've downloaded from iTunes.
 
m4cc45 said:
No they don't thats the entire argument in this case. Nothing is held on TPB's servers all they do is provide a link to it exactly the same as google do.



M.
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When I go to thepiratebay.org then and click 'Download this torrent' and it downloads nameoffile.torrent to my PC from the location http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/1234567/nameoffile.torrent, who was hosting that file if not TPB?

I should probably mention I do agree with you in principle, at the end of the day the users are the only people breaching any kind of copyright law and they are the only ones transferring any illegal material, however TPB are not quite as directly comparable to Google as you make out by virtue of the fact they host .torrent files, much like any other torrent index site does, and they also operate probably the most prolific public tracker system going. Again, whilst neither the .torrent file or the tracker contains anything illegal, they implicate TPB into the procedure of using bittorrent to download something far more than Google.
 
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Exactly, so TPB is not exactly the same as google, because google do not host .torrent files, regardless of their legality which is the point I was contesting.
 
m4cc45 said:
Don't you see it is exactly the same if anything google links to more as it indexes lots of sites and personal files. How can a site as big as TPB check all the files? Just because someone may put up a torrent of say 'Blockbuster Game AAA The Best Ever' doesn't neccessarily mean that is what the person is downloading.

With google you can search for anything with .torrent and it'll directly give you the torrent no matter if that's hosted on a persons PC (obviously as long as it's index'd it).



M.
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TPB is much more focused on distributing (not just linking to) torrents that google.
 
Kenai said:
Exactly, so TPB is not exactly the same as google, because google do not host .torrent files, regardless of their legality which is the point I was contesting.
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I can see where you're coming from but .torrent files contain nothing illegal. You can download as many .torrent files as you like, perfectly legally.
 
Le_Petit_Lapin said:
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?

I edited my previous post after you quoted it by the way, it might make my point clearer.

"I should probably mention I do agree with you in principle, at the end of the day the users are the only people breaching any kind of copyright law and they are the only ones transferring any illegal material, however TPB are not quite as directly comparable to Google as you make out by virtue of the fact they host .torrent files, much like any other torrent index site does, and they also operate probably the most prolific public tracker system going. Again, whilst neither the .torrent file or the tracker contains anything illegal, they implicate TPB into the procedure of using bittorrent to download something far more than Google."

All i'm saying is that the comparisons claiming Google do exactly the same thing are not strictly correct.

I think the overall verdict is massively unfair and I personally wouldn't be surprised to learn money/threats had been moving around behind the scenes of this case.
 
Yes, but Google takes down any illegal material complained of within a reasonable time, the pirate bay refused to.
 
fini said:
Yes, but Google takes down any illegal material complained of within a reasonable time, the pirate bay refused to.
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Is that ok then? It's fine to host illegal material as long as you take it down when asked? Because that's what mininova does, just wondering if it'll stop them going after them.
 
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