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> closest I get to helping you buy some is telling you the chemical ID How are those things in any way comparable? Knowing the chemical formula of a drug doesn

> closest I get to helping you buy some is telling you the chemical ID How are those things in any way comparable? Knowing the chemical formula of a drug doesn't get you any closer to possessing it, but knowing the ID of a torrent lets you immediately download it. At the end of the day, would you want law to be based on technical trivia, which can rapidly change, or do you want it be based on the intent of the persons involved?

Dylan16807 10y ago
You can put the ID of a chemical into a black market search engine just as you can put the ID of a torrent into the DHT search mechanisms. Both require that you know where to go, and use a third party search system to find the people that actually have the illegal material. At the end of the day, I want the responsibility to be on the people actually performing illegal distribution. And when someone provides a listing of what is available illegally, without who or where to get it from, that should be legal. In your opinion, if someone writes a highly-convincing page encouraging you to smoke opium, is that intent okay? Because to me that seems about equally far-removed from any drug crime as your typical torrent search engine is from infringement.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  But the distribution of profit is completely different in those two cases, and that's legally relevant. When you go on the dark web and buy something illegal, the money goes to the seller, whereas presumably nobody is directly profiting from the torrents.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    The obvious question then is how you classify a pirate bay clone that has no ads. No profits.
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      Are you being serious here? How do you think courts deal with these issues every day? Common sense. A pirate bay clone would still be knowingly and intentionally distributing links to infringing material, whether or not doing so without a financial incentive is illegal depends on the jurisdiction.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        And what makes it different from the hypothetical drug blog? I'm not saying it's innocent, I'm saying there's some weird mismatch here where you can't go with a mile of a copyright infringement but you can get pretty close to normal crimes as long as you don't touch anything or join a conspiracy.
      - bediger4000 10y ago
        If only determining that something is infringing were that easy. Given that everything fixed in a tangible form is copyrighted, and then copyright lasts until after the author has died, I have to know who fixed the material, when, and if they're still alive. It's an impossible situation, and you're glossing over it like it's easy and automatic. So: common sense doesn't enter into it.

Dylan16807 10y ago

You can put the ID of a chemical into a black market search engine just as you can put the ID of a torrent into the DHT search mechanisms. Both require that you know where to go, and use a third party search system to find the people that actually have the illegal material. At the end of the day, I want the responsibility to be on the people actually performing illegal distribution. And when someone provides a listing of what is available illegally, without who or where to get it from, that should be legal. In your opinion, if someone writes a highly-convincing page encouraging you to smoke opium, is that intent okay? Because to me that seems about equally far-removed from any drug crime as your typical torrent search engine is from infringement.

smallnamespace 10y ago
But the distribution of profit is completely different in those two cases, and that's legally relevant. When you go on the dark web and buy something illegal, the money goes to the seller, whereas presumably nobody is directly profiting from the torrents.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  The obvious question then is how you classify a pirate bay clone that has no ads. No profits.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Are you being serious here? How do you think courts deal with these issues every day? Common sense. A pirate bay clone would still be knowingly and intentionally distributing links to infringing material, whether or not doing so without a financial incentive is illegal depends on the jurisdiction.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      And what makes it different from the hypothetical drug blog? I'm not saying it's innocent, I'm saying there's some weird mismatch here where you can't go with a mile of a copyright infringement but you can get pretty close to normal crimes as long as you don't touch anything or join a conspiracy.
    - bediger4000 10y ago
      If only determining that something is infringing were that easy. Given that everything fixed in a tangible form is copyrighted, and then copyright lasts until after the author has died, I have to know who fixed the material, when, and if they're still alive. It's an impossible situation, and you're glossing over it like it's easy and automatic. So: common sense doesn't enter into it.