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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Is this legal? I’m of the impression that publishing infohashes to copyrighted content is illegal under DMCA?

Assuming the web server does not actually store and serve pages in a conventional sense, but rather acts like an application that can render the results of parsing and processing user's input, I wonder what are legal implications.

I can generate a Google link with an infohash in the same fashion: https://www.google.com/search?q=1548262051907755713575797913...

A few years ago, google stopped returning good links for strings that looked like bittorrent infohashes. Prior to that, it was actually a useful way to find information on and potentially trackers for an infohash you had

Yandex is the only search engine that's even marginal useful for that now.

It's probably as illegal as any other random number generator.

I wonder how hosting a torrent is different to google showing a link to a pirated movie, both are just holding data that tells you where to find the content, not the content itself

neither "hosts" the content. they both just point to the destination with the content.

I think Google is expected to abide DMCA takedowns in such cases, but IANAL. My understanding is that even an indirect reference (such as a link or infohash) is a DMCA violation.

They happily link to a prime number that will decrypt DVDs in blatant disregard for the DMCA, however. I don't believe they received a takedown request for this one.

https://www.theregister.com/2001/09/11/worlds_first_decss_ex...

That was The Pirate Bay's defense and... they're still around.

the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material. I believe that downloading is still illegal absent a fair use exemption but it's rarely prosecuted because you have to prove the absence of the exemption. It's uploading copyrighted content that's actually illegal and also easy to prosecute, so it's seeders that usually get bopped.

> the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material

I'm of the impression that serving either the infohash or the torrent is considered to violate DMCA. DMCA does not just forbid sharing copyrighted material, but also sharing links to the copyrighted material or generally anything that can help people bypass copyright protections (including software that can decrypt even trivial DRM).

if serving the infohash was a DMCA violation copyright holders would be thrilled to tear down every torrent site in existence. You can't link to the material, but the infohash isn't that either. It's conceptually a link to the torrent. You're partially right about DRM though. Software to directly circumvent copy protections is illegal under DMCA. But talking about the process is still not illegal, and that has led to some really clever workarounds like the DeCSS Haiku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku)

The site doesn't publish any, except the two legal torrents that are on the front page. Any others you have to either request specifically, or are simply randomly generated.

it is. same as with URLs the infringement is the actual copyrighted content not the pointing to it.

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