This is interesting. I am not versed enough in law to opine on whether the actual uploading/download itself would be considered legal or illegal - there are man

This is interesting. I am not versed enough in law to opine on whether the actual uploading/download itself would be considered legal or illegal - there are many very strong opinions here on many aspects, and none with a legal argument more convincing than "I believe if a judge looked at it they would ..." However, I would describe it differently: This is a "denial of information" (sort of a "denial of service") attack on the legal process. In order to actually sue, you need to have to make a more-than-good faith effort to discover who it is that wronged you and needs to make you whole - and, unlike torrents or emule or whatever kids are using these days, OFFSystem makes that part hard to discover or prove beyond reasonable doubt - especially if the descriptor block is transferred out of band. This is somewhat similar to shell games played by many legal "villains" such as patent trolls: You encapsulate company ownership through various jurisdictions (e.g. company A in the UK is wholly owned by company B in NL, which is owned by company C in the US, which is owned by company D in Russia, etc.); it is incredibly cheap to set up (a few thousand US$), and incredibly hard to unravel (tens to hundrends of thousands of US$). If you are trying to target such a company - e.g., to countersue, you realize you have no idea who to sue - you have an opaque company A, and not much to go on. Courts e.g. in germany, have ruled that IP address is not a good enough identifier to sue a person for copyright infringement unless you have other supporting data. It's not directly comparable, but indicates that OFFSystem might provide a defense, practically (can't figure out who to sue) and maybe even legally (not sufficient proof), depending on jurisdiction. It's the intent that matters in many cases, but burden of proof also matters. I think it is philosophically a very interesting question and far from clear cut.