4 ms·

This is true (I too have used it to download a distro from time to time), but it is simply not responsive to GP's point, which is that, unlike Google, TPB does

This is true (I too have used it to download a distro from time to time), but it is simply not responsive to GP's point, which is that, unlike Google, TPB does not comply with DMCA takedown requests and is "setup explicitly for the purpose of finding pirated material." When it comes to piracy, Google's situation is exactly opposite of TPB's: TPB is primarily designed to facilitate piracy, does not comply with DMCA takedown requests, and has incidental noninfringing uses. Google is not primarily designed to facilitate piracy, does comply with DMCA takedown requests, and only incidentally facilitates piracy.

jacquesm 10y ago
Why should the DMCA apply at all? It's an American law. The fact that it implements WIPO treaties does not change that fact, in other words, being DMCA compliant is not something that entities outside of the USA should have to be.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Because the .ORG registry is an American company. As disgusting as I feel agreeing with a AA on anything, they're probably within their legal rights here. Not that they should be, mind. Domain registry needs to be a neutral ground and absolutely should not be subject to any kind of takedowns. A domain name points to an IP address - go after that. If it points to another country, your job just got harder, but that doesn't make it my job.
- pdabbadabba 10y ago
  A fine point--and much better than the one I was responding to. I'll just say that extraterritoriality can be a difficult concept when the Internet is involved, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone here. (E.g., http://www.bna.com/court-refuses-to-dismiss-action-involving-an-infringing-video/ http://www.bna.com/court-refuses-to-dismiss-action-involving...) And, in any event, their response to DMCA take down requests (http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/ http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/) and efforts to evade U.S. jurisdiction (not that it helped them much given their serious legal problems at home in Sweden) is pretty good evidence of their intentions--though it is hardly the best evidence available. A business that was not intentionally facilitating piracy would probably just comply with the DMCA takedown notices and, as a bonus, not have to spend all its time hiding its servers.
  - joemi 10y ago
    > A business that was not intentionally facilitating piracy would probably just comply with the DMCA takedown notices and, as a bonus, not have to spend all its time hiding its servers. I strongly disagree. Look at how many big name American companies have fake HQ's and other such arrangements in other countries in an effort to pay less American taxes. Companies in general try to get out of all kinds of things (taxes, responsibilities, etc) all the time, and doing so is not any kind of admission of legal transgressions. If I had an American company and I was getting legal threats from an organization in another country that was citing their country's laws, you can bet I'd do everything I could to avoid having to comply... regardless of whether or not I was actually breaking any laws at all.
    - pdabbadabba 10y ago
      > If I had an American company and I was getting legal threats from an organization in another country that was citing their country's laws, you can bet I'd do everything I could to avoid having to comply... regardless of whether or not I was actually breaking any laws at all. Maybe this is true as a statement about what you would do in this situation. But it does not much resemble the behavior of most actual organizations engaged in a legitimate line of business. (To be sure, some may try to avoid the U.S. market entirely. But TPB has not done that. They're content to serve U.S. users, just not to obey U.S. laws.)
      - joemi 10y ago
        > But it does not much resemble the behavior of most actual organizations engaged in a legitimate line of business. Attempting to avoid taxes through legal loopholes is exactly the behavior of many large business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Companies_using_the_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa... In case you think taxes are a completely different scenario (an opinion which I would take issue with), companies trying to avoid other laws in other countries also happens very often. See Google vs. Spain, for example, where Google fought to not have to change their practices to comply with local (Spanish/EU) laws. Complying with laws in another country often means having to change how a company does things. Change almost always means costs for the company, either in rebuilding things, retraining people, or general loss of revenue. Therefore it's often in a company's best interest to resist such change, if they think they have a chance they can.
- riskable 10y ago
  A better question is how the DMCA could possibly apply to a site that doesn't host a single file. It's a search engine for (magnet) URLs that anyone can submit to. How do you submit a takedown for a "file" when there's no files to speak of?
mbesto 10y ago
Where precisely does it explicitly say on TPB's website that it is "setup for the purpose of finding pirated material." In fact they explicitly state otherwise: The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent indexer. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers. No torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the site. I'd appreciate a copy paste of the specific text that says they are setup with the purpose to find pirated material, otherwise it's implied and it's very different.
- ksk 10y ago
  It doesn't have to say on the bottle of water that it is explicitly sold to quench your thirst either. People are not stupid.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    The only thing piracy-focused is the userbase. I don't think it's fair to shut down a content-neutral site based on the percentage of users that are doing illegal things.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    Bottled water is used for like 1000x more applications then "thirst quench". For example - I just watered my garden with it.
    - ksk 10y ago
      Sorry you just lost me. I thought you were genuine but now I realize you're wasting everyone's time. Good bye.
- notahacker 10y ago
  Since when was it required for someone to explicitly state "the purpose of this website is to commit this civil/criminal offence" for a court to rule that a website owner is intentionally committing or assisting in an offence? I mean, if it calls itself the Pirate Bay and publicly refuses to remove references to pirated material on request (whilst pruning links to fake torrents) it's pretty difficult to take seriously an argument that the preponderance of references to pirated material is merely incidental.

jacquesm 10y ago

Why should the DMCA apply at all? It's an American law. The fact that it implements WIPO treaties does not change that fact, in other words, being DMCA compliant is not something that entities outside of the USA should have to be.

Karunamon 10y ago
Because the .ORG registry is an American company. As disgusting as I feel agreeing with a AA on anything, they're probably within their legal rights here. Not that they should be, mind. Domain registry needs to be a neutral ground and absolutely should not be subject to any kind of takedowns. A domain name points to an IP address - go after that. If it points to another country, your job just got harder, but that doesn't make it my job.
pdabbadabba 10y ago
A fine point--and much better than the one I was responding to. I'll just say that extraterritoriality can be a difficult concept when the Internet is involved, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone here. (E.g., http://www.bna.com/court-refuses-to-dismiss-action-involving-an-infringing-video/ http://www.bna.com/court-refuses-to-dismiss-action-involving...) And, in any event, their response to DMCA take down requests (http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/ http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/) and efforts to evade U.S. jurisdiction (not that it helped them much given their serious legal problems at home in Sweden) is pretty good evidence of their intentions--though it is hardly the best evidence available. A business that was not intentionally facilitating piracy would probably just comply with the DMCA takedown notices and, as a bonus, not have to spend all its time hiding its servers.
- joemi 10y ago
  > A business that was not intentionally facilitating piracy would probably just comply with the DMCA takedown notices and, as a bonus, not have to spend all its time hiding its servers. I strongly disagree. Look at how many big name American companies have fake HQ's and other such arrangements in other countries in an effort to pay less American taxes. Companies in general try to get out of all kinds of things (taxes, responsibilities, etc) all the time, and doing so is not any kind of admission of legal transgressions. If I had an American company and I was getting legal threats from an organization in another country that was citing their country's laws, you can bet I'd do everything I could to avoid having to comply... regardless of whether or not I was actually breaking any laws at all.
  - pdabbadabba 10y ago
    > If I had an American company and I was getting legal threats from an organization in another country that was citing their country's laws, you can bet I'd do everything I could to avoid having to comply... regardless of whether or not I was actually breaking any laws at all. Maybe this is true as a statement about what you would do in this situation. But it does not much resemble the behavior of most actual organizations engaged in a legitimate line of business. (To be sure, some may try to avoid the U.S. market entirely. But TPB has not done that. They're content to serve U.S. users, just not to obey U.S. laws.)
    - joemi 10y ago
      > But it does not much resemble the behavior of most actual organizations engaged in a legitimate line of business. Attempting to avoid taxes through legal loopholes is exactly the behavior of many large business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Companies_using_the_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa... In case you think taxes are a completely different scenario (an opinion which I would take issue with), companies trying to avoid other laws in other countries also happens very often. See Google vs. Spain, for example, where Google fought to not have to change their practices to comply with local (Spanish/EU) laws. Complying with laws in another country often means having to change how a company does things. Change almost always means costs for the company, either in rebuilding things, retraining people, or general loss of revenue. Therefore it's often in a company's best interest to resist such change, if they think they have a chance they can.
riskable 10y ago
A better question is how the DMCA could possibly apply to a site that doesn't host a single file. It's a search engine for (magnet) URLs that anyone can submit to. How do you submit a takedown for a "file" when there's no files to speak of?

mbesto 10y ago

Where precisely does it explicitly say on TPB's website that it is "setup for the purpose of finding pirated material." In fact they explicitly state otherwise: The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent indexer. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers. No torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the site. I'd appreciate a copy paste of the specific text that says they are setup with the purpose to find pirated material, otherwise it's implied and it's very different.

ksk 10y ago
It doesn't have to say on the bottle of water that it is explicitly sold to quench your thirst either. People are not stupid.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  The only thing piracy-focused is the userbase. I don't think it's fair to shut down a content-neutral site based on the percentage of users that are doing illegal things.
- mbesto 10y ago
  Bottled water is used for like 1000x more applications then "thirst quench". For example - I just watered my garden with it.
  - ksk 10y ago
    Sorry you just lost me. I thought you were genuine but now I realize you're wasting everyone's time. Good bye.
notahacker 10y ago
Since when was it required for someone to explicitly state "the purpose of this website is to commit this civil/criminal offence" for a court to rule that a website owner is intentionally committing or assisting in an offence? I mean, if it calls itself the Pirate Bay and publicly refuses to remove references to pirated material on request (whilst pruning links to fake torrents) it's pretty difficult to take seriously an argument that the preponderance of references to pirated material is merely incidental.