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Comment by cdh | Hacker News Reader

Has it actually been established that merely linking to copyrighted content is illegal in the United States? I'm not trying to troll, just genuinely curious.

My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.

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The NET act criminalizes any willful "copyright infringement" (the term used in the act) so long as it's done for financial gain. Contributory or vicarious liability for copyright infringement for linking is well established.

At any rate, services like these rely on the DMCA Safe Harbor provision. Regardless of whether the potential liability is civil or criminal, you can't have actual knowledge of infringing activity on your site and the ability to remove that activity from your site and claim safe harbor.

What about Google? They make a copy of almost every image on the internet with the full knowledge that they are nearly all covered under an absolute copyright license of "All Rights Reserved", including the right to store and rehost a copy of that content. How would Google's financial outlook change if they decide to follow the letter of the law and never use pieces of copyrighted works "for financial gain" without explicit permission from each rightsholder first?

It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al is that the media companies like one more than the other.

> It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al is that the media companies NEED one more than the other.

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