When names are routinely erased for political reasons, why would one ever give credence to the official story?
To be fair, none of my domains are as high profile as this one, but still, I somehow doubt this is because they haven't verified their whois data.
IANAL, but here's one argument against TPB: a checksum of a "controlled file" seems to me akin to the code name of a "controlled substance". If a guy tells you that if you want heroin, you should ask around for "wombats", and then you go ask around for "wombats" and buy some heroin, did the dude that told you the code name do something illegal?
Now what if he was just a robot that repeated what he heard, and gathered reviews? "I heard heroin is called wombat, and 100 people are happy with that information". TPB does a little more than that (monitor the number of seeders / leechers, which is integral to prevent fake torrents being submitted), and makes quite a pretty penny off of their services, as well.
Laws are not software. They are not run like software. This is one of the reasons why.
But simultaneously, marijuana incorporation only became a thing because of a dedicated community flouting the law long enough for the disinterested majority to see the ridiculousness of it.
Driving a taxi is legal, and telling people where to find a bank is legal, but if you start advertising a "bank robber target selection and getaway service" then you'll end up being thrown in jail for bank robbery, because you were knowingly assisting in the crime even though your actions taken in isolation were entirely legal.
Similarly, providing someone with a checksum of a file is not copyright infringement in itself, but it becomes illegal when you do it with the intent of assisting copyright infringement.
In USA format shifting is allowed, downloading a format shifted copy of media is logically equivalent and morally probably slightly superior (less time/energy waste?). Don't know if that line of reasoning had been tested yet? There are countries where it is not a tort to download nor upload what would otherwise be considered copyright material.
In short TPB does nothing in terms of contributory infringement that other indexing sites (Google, Bing, etc) don't do.
There behaviour is the same no matter your intent; do you have a more convincing argument that accounts for common carrier protections and explains why of I get a work using a link from Google it's not infringing but getting one from TPB makes it tortuous?
That is an argument that you are making, not a foregone conclusion. First off, the branding matters when it comes to intent. The name, "The Pirate Bay" leaves it pretty clear what they're expecting you to do with the site.
Also, there's the fact that Google and other search engines are responsive to DMCA requests, TPB is not. Finally, there's the political positions of the organization running the site.
Their service is much closer to cperciva's analogy than it is to a normal search engine.
To a lawyer, the details don't matter much at all as long as there's enough evidence to prove the intent.
To an engineer, only the details do matter because otherwise the world as organised by engineering will become completely chaotic, i.e. why is this number illegal and another number not, and if X holds for this thing then X should hold for all similar things.
One thing that underlines this is that hackers don't see laws as an authority, they actually tend to question laws by default.
As far as I can see, the majority of hacker-type people see no legal/moral issue in copying music and films. Copying is just bits, bits are a convenient format to distribute and store content, and they'll surely buy a certain album or film not because they couldn't somehow get it for free but because it's so good that they want to own it themselves. This is completely in opposition how MAFIAA thinks people behave, and lawyers work for MAFIAA.
So, hackers and engineers are placed in the whole legal game by putting them in the position of the defendant. Instead of MAFIAA having to think why would they be allowed to sue someone for copying their own bits, the hackers are forced to come up with reasons why something of an ordinary activity (in their world) such as copying wouldn't be illegal. That's where the common outcry originates from: the kind of story how I was just driving taxi, took a guy to the bank, he asked to wait outside, and he came back in a hurry to the docklands, so I did as requested and he paid with a hundred dollar bill.
The events are unusual, mechanistic, machines connect and exchange bits, taxis take rides from the bank to the outskirts of the city, because it's mechanisms that engineers work with. Mechanisms can always be used for good or bad similar to science, and it's not the engineers' job to consider one method illegal and another legal, nor the scientists job to consider one field illegal and another legal. For an engineer, rights and wrongs are universal while legal opinions aren't.
Moreover, throw a libertarian mindset in the mix and you've got a hacker both working with these mechanisms and also living by the idea that his activities are innately private, bits can't be owned, and everybody should play by the rules spelled out by the objective truths and laws of physics rather than the arbitrary laws made up by the society made of non-experts.
Then bring in a lawyer telling them that not all file checksums come equal and they'll tell him he's full of bullshit. At the point where the two paths――the engineering path and the lawyer path――meet there is absolutely no conversation left because the paths come from completely different worlds.
The law basically says that if a service is primarily used for illegal purposes, then running that service is illegal under current assisting laws. The intention of the law makers was to give the police the ability to shut down biker bars that was used as headquarters, without the normal procedure of having to find tax crimes or some other excuse to shut it down.
The prosecutor in the pirate bay case provided a screenshot of the top 100 shared file list and said that this proved that the primary usage of the site was copyright infringement. The defense argued that you could not determine this, using the long tail argument. The court went with the prosecutors argument and so did the appeal court.
If you want to do something that's currently illegal, CHANGE THE LAWS.