6 ms·

> Is this legal? Why wouldn't it be? You're not actually hosting a tracker in this case, only looking at incoming connections. And even if you do run a tracker

• jekwoooooe 1y ago
  Is this legal isn’t a useful question. The better question is how likely are you to get sued? With civil lawsuits it doesn’t matter if it’s legal you can be sued and harassed by lawyers if you get on their radar.
  • legohead 1y ago
    No need to sue. Send a cease and desist and your average hacker like OP will take it down in a hurry...
    • daneel_w 1y ago
      In this case not even a cease-and-desist was needed. Just seeing 1.7M peers crying out in the void for company was enough. Living in a country overly friendly with Hollywood and its money, I do understand him.
      • account42 1y ago
        Yes, prime example of a chilling effect where the fear of a lawsuit stops people from engaging in perfectly legal activities. It's unfortunate that copyright law does not concern itself with collateral damage like this.
        • Suzuran 1y ago
          This is not collateral damage, this is the intended effect - decreasing their competition, legal or otherwise.
    • account42 1y ago
      I think the point is that you can't count on that and need to assume that you are going to attract actual lawsuits. DMCA provides easier take down options for copyright owners but AFAIK does not compel them to make use of those options before going to court.
      • GTP 1y ago
        I think companies will try with a strongly worded letter first, as this would save them money over straight going to court. But I get that the risk may not be worth it for many people, I myself would be very scared if I received a letter threatening a lawsuit for a ridiculous amount of money, even knowing that they are exaggerating the scale of damages just to scare me.
    • driverdan 1y ago
      Unfortunately what they will do is file a DMCA with the hosting provider. Most will immediately shut you down, none of them defend their customers.
      • autoexec 1y ago
        Considering the obscene fines courts have granted the media industry who claim losses with zero basis in reality it's only to be expected. Would you be willing/able to defend your customers when faced with billions in fines and a court system that has been aggressively favoring your opponent?
  • bilekas 1y ago
    I’m not sure if that’s true actually, you might get a takedown notice, but to sue, and maybe I’m wrong but you have to claim damages, all op has to do is not announce out? IE he can see the peer pool but they don’t announce the peer list.
    • dymk 1y ago
      The RIAA doesn't have to sue to make OP's life miserable. They have enough lawyers on the payroll to drown him in perfectly legal demand letters. Go one step further and assume the demand letters are harassment - what's OP going to do, sue the RIAA?
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retric 1y ago
        Nahh, for a bunch of annoying letters take them to small claims court. Cheap for you, expensive for them, and you win if they don’t show up.
        • dymk 1y ago
          haha, no, this is not their first rodeo
          • Retric 1y ago
            Sure, but that’s why they avoid this kind of harassment in the first place. You made a hypothetical assuming they would do something they wouldn’t because it puts them at risk.
        • account42 1y ago
          This is a cool feel good theory but can you show an example of this working?
          • 1y ago
  • ranger_danger 1y ago
    > Is this legal isn’t a useful question Why do you say that? I think even seemingly "useless" questions can lead to valuable discussions and insights... and it might also be possible that your perspective is not the only valid one. What's useful (or not) to one person is not always the same for others.
    • diffeomorphism 1y ago
      You may want to adjust your LLM settings. Your post seemingly dropped everything but the first sentence from the context window and then wrote vapid fluff that makes no sense in context.
      • ranger_danger 1y ago
        I do not use any LLM, thanks
  • chaboud 1y ago
    This is definitely the right pragmatic take. A lawyer friend of mine once laid it out for me: "in litigation, if you go to court, even if you win, you lose". The reality is that court sucks, and getting sued sucks for all but the ultra-wealthy (who can absorb the cost). For those of us with less than $100MM, court is a universe to be avoided.
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      >A lawyer friend of mine once laid it out for me: "in litigation, if you go to court, even if you win, you lose" In my country we have a phrase for this exact scenario: "the punishment is the process". When the government or a powerful person wants to fuck with you, all they have to do is drag you endlessly through the court system, even knowing they'll loose. Because the experience will be 100x more painful for you to win than it is for them to loose. It's what the UK government did to the postal workers in the Fujitsu scandal.
      • koakuma-chan 1y ago
        Is there a limit how many concurrent lawsuits can be thrown at one person?
        • tristor 1y ago
          No, not technically, however in the US there are the SLAPP statutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
    • busterarm 1y ago
      Don't underestimate this. My family members sued each other over a small inheritance. 5 kids fighting over a couple million dollars. Case has dragged out across almost 4 decades. Lawyer fees dwarfed the size of what was being fought over several times over. Some family spent time in jail for contempt of court... Family members then put up all their personal assets to keep fighting. Then they lost and were faced with a judgment that left them destitute well into their retirement years with no way to earn new money. Some family members are still appealing and fighting adjacent court battles (property seizure, etc). This process has consumed the last decades of their lives and everything they worked their whole lives for. Not only would I say never end up in court, I'll extend you one further. Never get the government involved in your personal relationships.
• jedberg 1y ago
  Do you think the police understand this nuance? Especially since most of the traffic that will go through there is probably copyright infringement? They'll just see tracker and assume it's illegal.
  • hungryhobbit 1y ago
    Do you think the police are actually policing the internet? Even if you didn't mean your local police, and meant a national body like the FBI, the truth is they focus on other crimes (eg. child abuse), and even then they are woefully unable to handle even most of those crimes. The vast, vast majority of copyright enforcement comes from copyright holders ... not the internet copyright police.
    • jedberg 1y ago
      Of course not. But first a copyright holder tells the police, and then the police enforce it. The police rarely find crimes on their own -- they are almost always acting on a request from someone else.
      • swat535 1y ago
        Nitpick but police follow the courts, not the copyright holders.
  • SXX 1y ago
    > Especially since most of the traffic that will go through there is probably copyright infringement? Copyright infinging materials dont go "though" trackers. Trackers only keep torrent hashes and lists of peers.
    • jeroenhd 1y ago
      So do torrent websites like the pirate bay. That doesn't protect pirates from getting sued to hell and back or even receiving prison sentences from the court.
• gpm 1y ago
  Because knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes. There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably not) make it not a crime, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But your general thought when you hear "helping someone else commit a crime" ought to be "that's probably a crime itself".
  • rockskon 1y ago
    Wouldn't particular knowledge be required? I'm sure Google devs know in the abstract that Google search is used by criminals to help them in committing crimes, but that clearly is not illegal in and of itself.
    • rvnx 1y ago
      Well Google has knowledge about it, but once you reach a certain scale you become safe (e.g. OpenAI with copyright infringment)
      • justinclift 1y ago
        And Facebook/Meta, for the same.
    • gpm 1y ago
      There's definitely a mens rea requirement here, that you know that a crime is being committed and that you intend to facilitate it. I doubt it requires particularized knowledge that "this specific request" is for a crime... I'm still not a lawyer. Running a service primarily for legal purposes that some criminals can take advantage of is pretty different with regards to intent than reviving an old domain name that you know is primarily used by old illegal torrents as a tracker. I spent a few minutes googling, and it seems like that at least as of a decade ago the exact bounds here weren't well defined: https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-justice-kagan-writes-a-primer-on-aiding-and-abetting-law/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-justice-... > Finally, the possible liability for an “incidental facilitator” – such as a firearms dealer who knows that some customers will use their purchases for crime – is noted but not resolved. Thus, thankfully, there is still some fertile ground for hypotheticals with which we practicing law professors can bedevil our students.
• leijurv 1y ago
  OP did actually host a tracker. "I then started the tracker. After about an hour, it peaked at about 1.7 million distinct torrents across 3.1 million peers!"
• numpad0 1y ago
  Because music & movie industries hate P2P in general? That basically killed P2P dead in 2000s as it was becoming the next generation of decentralized Web. Maybe it's about time to revisit it? It's just the matter of how to enforce DRM. They shouldn't care in this day and age with plenty ways to get licensing sorted out.
  • geon 1y ago
    Dead? It is as alive as ever.
• KomoD 1y ago
  (IANAL) It can be both legal and illegal If you don't respond to takedowns, that's probably leaning towards being illegal* If you respond to takedowns and blacklist the hashes, you're most likely fine* *obviously depends on the jurisdiction and on whether matching hashes to IP:PORT is considered distribution/facilitation/whatever (take TPB's case as an example) I know someone who ran a pretty large tracker for years, when he received a takedown he just blacklisted the hashes and he's been fine so far.
• anilakar 1y ago
  Yeah. There are trackers (hosts used for coordination between bittorrent peers) and there are "trackers" (sites used for hosting .torrent files and magnet: URIs). Takedowns have been targeted exclusively at the latter.
• eli 1y ago
  The Anti-Circumvention Clause in the DMCA says "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology [...] is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [or] has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title"
  • myrmidon 1y ago
    It seems difficult to argue that this would apply, because what would the "technological measure to control access" be that a bittorrent client (or tracker) is circumventing? I also don't know of any precedent where bittorrent software/client itself was ruled illegal (but am not a lawyer).
    • lacoolj 1y ago
      The technological measure to control access is probably a crawler looking for standard download links for lawyers to send out C/D letters. Good question though, would love to know what specific tech is in use (or if it's just "finding it on search engines organically")
    • eli 1y ago
      https://www.oyez.org/cases/2004/04-480 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2004/04-480