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Comment by JohnLeTigre | Hacker News Reader

the fact that they enable people to search for things does not remove the honus from individuals as to whether or not they should do illegal acts.

For example, it is not because a dictionnary has a definition of the word "murder" that suddenly it creates murderers.

There is no causality.

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If I set up a website called MurderBay consisting of listings of people available to er... perform tasks, I'd expect law enforcement to try to take down my site as well as the people actually using it to procure assassins. Especially if the vast majority of links listed on my website were to assassins' contact information and my site was well known for the blog articles I'd published telling parties requesting I remove assassins' contact information to "go sodomize yourself with retractable batons."

This is really not a good comparison as, unless MurderBay specifically seeks out assassins/murders to make postings offering their services or specifically encourages users to request said services, then it is no different than any other communication website.

MurderBay technically already exists in the form of Craigslist, Backpage, and other more local classified posting sites. Whether they be jokes or serious offers/requests, postings for murder, drugs, human-trafficking, and prostitution occur hourly on legal websites, many hosted within the US. Backpage in particular has been targeted by human rights groups as it has had multiple cases where human trafficking and child pornography were arranged/traded through the site. The website, to my knowledge, was compliant with law enforcement to the degree required by law, and the sites still exist to this day.

The reason is that, like with other websites that collect user submitted content, as long as the operators are compliant with the law in regards to the content, they're not liable in the way most people think.

So no, unless MurderBay is seeking out assassins and murders, you should not expect law enforcement to take it down. You probably can expect quite a few phonecalls and emails though. Likewise, unless ThePirateBay is seeking out pirated content and pirate groups, it should not be expected that it be taken down.

As you point out, classifieds and listings services already exist; the distinguishing feature of MurderBay is that everything from the website name to the owners' public declarations of contempt for takedown requests is designed to encourage people to use the site to seek out assassins/murders and as a result the vast majority of people using the site are there to search for links to facilitate the commitment of murders. Sound familiar? (OK, much worse, fair enough) The same could not be said for Craigslist, which is why Craig Newmark has spent an awful lot less time in courtrooms and prison cells than the people behind a certain Swedish website despite his website probably having facilitated the commitment of crimes that hurt people a lot more than filesharing ever conceivably could.

Contempt is not a basis for taking down a website. If the only 'encouragement' for certain groups to use a site is the political opinions of the owner, then that is not a legal problem.

In the legal opinion of more than a few courts it is. You don't have to be at all sympathetic to the RIAA to imagine why it might be a struggle for a legal team to persuasively argue that a site called the Pirate Bay which used to[1] boast that it had never taken a link to a torrent off the site and never would actually was encouraging the piracy that most of its visitors used it for.

[1]probably still does; I can't access it through regular web browsing due to a legal ruling...

If boasting had a legal basis for the courts to respect, a lot of rappers would be in trouble over the past decades.

I get it: you think sentiment should be conclusive, and in many cases you could say that it is in practice, but it's hard if not impossible to make a case against a disfavorable entity solely on that basis.

And the RIAA has certainly disparaged defendants in many if not all cases. Hard to say how much effect it really has, though.

Conspiracy to commit murder is a crime in itself though, as is offering to murder for hire, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement isn't AFAIAA. Also copyright is a tort, murder is a crime. The part about you being asked to take down information is also not analogous.

A better analogy IMO would be a website that gave you directions to get information as to where there was a gap that you could use to access a private beach, both are giving information that allows you to later commit a tort. Such a website would be any search engine.

>AFAIAA

As Far As I Association of America?

"am aware", presumably.

Oh, haha, yup, most likely that.

It's pretty common, also the answer in the first hit I get back from both Google and Bing. Sorry if it was too slangy.

Set up an MVP with fake profiles and see what happens. Let us know how it turns out.

You're trying to find a loophole.

Maybe this kind of sophistry could work on some lawyers or policemen, but it's really not a convincing argument.

I guess you could call it a loophole, but this loophole is incredibly important for a free internet. Without it, there's no way for a public service that hosts user generated files to exist because people will use it for piracy.

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