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Comment by obsaysditto | Hacker News Reader

Rather than supplying very specific URLs where infringing material could be located as is the norm with these type of requests, the BPI provided whole site URLs such as http://megaupload.com, http://sendspace.com and http://hotfile.com.

This seems absurd, however I do wonder what the percentage of files hosted on these sites are copyrighted.

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Every file is copyrighted dude, except content gone into public domain ... I think you meant "illegally distributed".

I browsed the site instead of using the search just now. It's possible that many of the torrents I've never heard of are independent artists in the public domain (or released CC, whatever), but almost all files in all categories were illegally distributed content. The exception was the "Applications > Unix" category.

It's a site that calls itself "The Pirate Bay." They don't have much of a defense in the way of legitimate (legal) use cases, but I strongly disagree with legislating results out of a general-purpose search engine.

I honestly do not see this going anywhere. As much as I disagree with almost everything the DMCA stands for, safe harbor provisions were included for exactly this reason.

> It's a site that calls itself "The Pirate Bay."

So? I belong to a political party called "the Pirate Party", doesn't mean I'm breaking the law.

If you exist solely for the purposes of facilitating piracy, you probably are, depending on the country. Go ask a lawyer.

We exist solely for the purpose of changing UK government policy to something sensible. This means inter alia that some actions now called "piracy" would become legal.

* Equating copyright reform with supporting piracy will harm any attempt at copyright reform.

* I didn't give you permission to steal my work to advance any objective.

I think you've created a manifesto to justify stealing things, because you like stealing things.

How many times do you have to be told that copyright infringement is not theft, for it to sink in?

a) Have you proven stealing my work isn't theft yet?

b) Regardless whether you personally define stealing my work as being theft or not, does that make it less wrong? Because I strongly suspect that's what you're implying.

You still haven't responded to how equating copyright reform with piracy helps copyright reform in any way.

Well you could upload all the books from project gutenberg and librivox.org.

But even then, I doubt that 1% would be non-copyrighted.

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