I routinely use the Pirate Bay to find torrents of Linux distros that are not even approximately "pirated material." It does have legitimate use cases.
When it comes to piracy, Google's situation is exactly opposite of TPB's: TPB is primarily designed to facilitate piracy, does not comply with DMCA takedown requests, and has incidental noninfringing uses. Google is not primarily designed to facilitate piracy, does comply with DMCA takedown requests, and only incidentally facilitates piracy.
It's an American law. The fact that it implements WIPO treaties does not change that fact, in other words, being DMCA compliant is not something that entities outside of the USA should have to be.
And, in any event, their response to DMCA take down requests (http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/) and efforts to evade U.S. jurisdiction (not that it helped them much given their serious legal problems at home in Sweden) is pretty good evidence of their intentions--though it is hardly the best evidence available. A business that was not intentionally facilitating piracy would probably just comply with the DMCA takedown notices and, as a bonus, not have to spend all its time hiding its servers.
I strongly disagree. Look at how many big name American companies have fake HQ's and other such arrangements in other countries in an effort to pay less American taxes. Companies in general try to get out of all kinds of things (taxes, responsibilities, etc) all the time, and doing so is not any kind of admission of legal transgressions.
If I had an American company and I was getting legal threats from an organization in another country that was citing their country's laws, you can bet I'd do everything I could to avoid having to comply... regardless of whether or not I was actually breaking any laws at all.
Maybe this is true as a statement about what you would do in this situation. But it does not much resemble the behavior of most actual organizations engaged in a legitimate line of business. (To be sure, some may try to avoid the U.S. market entirely. But TPB has not done that. They're content to serve U.S. users, just not to obey U.S. laws.)
Attempting to avoid taxes through legal loopholes is exactly the behavior of many large business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa...
In case you think taxes are a completely different scenario (an opinion which I would take issue with), companies trying to avoid other laws in other countries also happens very often. See Google vs. Spain, for example, where Google fought to not have to change their practices to comply with local (Spanish/EU) laws.
Complying with laws in another country often means having to change how a company does things. Change almost always means costs for the company, either in rebuilding things, retraining people, or general loss of revenue. Therefore it's often in a company's best interest to resist such change, if they think they have a chance they can.
With taxes, on the other hand, there is, as you say, conclusive evidence that companies bend over backwards to avoid (e.g.) U.S. taxes. This is because those taxes are burdensome to very many (probably all) businesses. Most businesses with the resources to do so will therefore go to great lengths to avoid those taxes.
The evidence of companies' efforts to avoid DMCA obligations, on the other hand, is tellingly different. Unlike taxes, most companies do not go to great lengths to avoid DMCA obligations. This includes foreign companies with large user bases, and sites that facilitate the sharing of media such as YouTube, Flickr, Tumbly, Vimeo, etc. But TPB does. This tells you that DMCA is more of a burden on TPB than on most companies. I wonder why that might be...
I genuinely cannot believe we are still debating whether a primary purpose of The Pirate Bay is to facilitate piracy. Of course it is.
I'd love to see something that backs this up.
> I genuinely cannot believe we are still debating whether a primary purpose of The Pirate Bay is to facilitate piracy. Of course it is.
I'm not debating that at all. I'm just arguing that someone trying to avoid a foreign law that (at least debatably) does not apply in their country is by no means an admission of any sort of shady intentions, but is in fact simply common and sound business practice.
Not that they should be, mind. Domain registry needs to be a neutral ground and absolutely should not be subject to any kind of takedowns. A domain name points to an IP address - go after that. If it points to another country, your job just got harder, but that doesn't make it my job.
How do you submit a takedown for a "file" when there's no files to speak of?
The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent indexer. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers.
No torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the site.
I'd appreciate a copy paste of the specific text that says they are setup with the purpose to find pirated material, otherwise it's implied and it's very different.
Some days are more dystopian than others.
If you run over someone with your car by accident, it's at worst manslaughter (and probably no crime at all). But if you did it intentionally it's murder. I could come up with examples like this literally all day.
This is simply not relevant. They do not have to explicitly say anything for it to still be indisputable that they are set up primarily to facilitate piracy.
> In fact they explicitly state otherwise
Nope! The quote you posted only says that they do not store copyrighted material themselves. That is entirely consistent with being set up primarily to facilitate piracy through BitTorrent. In fact, the awareness that your quote suggests of the copyrighted material TPB makes available (note that I'm not saying "storing") is perhaps weak evidence for the opposite conclusion: they know that they're promoting piracy, but think they can get away with it because they aren't actually storing the files. (They are, of course, completely wrong. You can intentionally facilitate piracy without actually pirating works yourself. Remember Napster and LimeWire?)
Why not use the official downloads and torrents? Seems like you're exposing yourself to unnecessary risk like this, unless you're religious about checking every download signature against the official ones.