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Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

As much as I'd like torrents to be more tolerated, there is a difference in that the torrent sites contain the .torrent files which contains all the necessary info to download files. ie, They're supplying more than just a link.

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This isn't true for magnet links, which are just hashes that are used as keys in the DHT'S KV store.

Example is btdigg which exclusively crawls and indexes magnet links from the DHT

There is legally and effectively nothing different about the two. They both give you what you need to get the file. The extra layer of indirection of having to get peers from DHT rather than a tracker doesn't matter.

Given the topic is the difference between an article and a link to it (one level of indirection), the indirection does matter (at least, if you are google).

> They both give you what you need to get the file.

I can give you what you need just by telling you to torrent f09c8d0884590088f4004e010a928f8b6178c2fd

That's even less than a hyperlink. It would be absolutely ridiculous to say that I'm publishing the torrent.

There is nothing logically different between providing a .torrent file and a magnet URI. They both point you to the file.

If sharing .torrent file is illegal, then so is the magnet. The court doesn’t care about “Um technically there is a DHT in the middle here”.

A torrent file only contains a hash checksum of the data and a tracker url (basically a "link" to the tracker). A magnet has the same hash but uses the DHT to find seeders while a torrent file looks for seeders connected to the tracker.

Personally I don't see that as being materially different to a magnet link.

The only difference is the DHT is acting like a kind of super-tracker.

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