5 ms·

I never understood the pirate bay defence that they are like google. Google never hosted torrents or trackers, Pirate Bay's entire existence is for hosting tor

• matthavener 18y ago
  Like a torrent, a search engine tells you where to find the information you're looking for. I think its a bit of a stretch, but I'm guessing thats the general idea
• andr 18y ago
  Pirate Bay hosts torrents which use many different tracks - not only The Pirate Bay's. And a .torrent file in that sense is similar to a link.
• cookiecaper 18y ago
  The idea is that The Pirate Bay merely points its users to where certain information can be found. A torrent file is basically just a list of pieces, consisting of hashes and filenames and other very basic metadata that is in no way whatsoever copyrightable, and a tracker is just a thing that tells you who to contact to grab those pieces. The only difference here is that Google sends this all at once in a static HTML file -- a big list of things related to your search, which almost always includes copyrighted content; and Google is worse than TPB, because Google keeps significant copies of copyrighted material server-side, whereas TPB and other torrent sites as a rule keep none.