Music Industry Threatens to Sue UK Pirate Party over Pirate Bay Proxy | Hacker News Reader

Music Industry Threatens to Sue UK Pirate Party over Pirate Bay Proxy

torrentfreak.com

34 pointsanons201113 comments

I wonder if they will also go after Google which hosts everything that ThePirateBay does:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eAYXcZa...

If you don't use torrents, then you must understand TPB don't use 'torrent files' any more. They use 'magnet links' which are just hyperlinks with the seed info embedded, so when Google caches their pages they cache this info too.

You can initiate torrent downloads from that page exactly as you can from ThePirateBay.

You can also get a text file filled with a scrap of all the magnet links from TPB. What this effectively means is that with a single 1USD flash drive, you can "infringe" on the copyright (to the same extent that TPB does) of an absolutely unprecedented amount of content, merely by handing that flashdrive to somebody else. Millions of magnet links, at how many million dollars a pop? Insane.

Relevant: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Kiosk

Tthey are effectively saying distributing a 160 bit number is effectively illegal. Magnets are just SHA1 hashes of a torrent file.

Then again, you could argue any media or program stored is just a really long many-bit number, so I guess we have been making numbers illegal for decades.

Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

It's not clear that the proxy is being sued for copyright infringement. It might be for "aiding and abetting". After all, driving a car is not illegal, but driving a getaway car for a bank robber is. Or it might even be a civil case in which they claim damages.

The magnet link is basically a hash of a bunch of hashes of copyrighted content.

If distributing that is wrong, is it okay to distribute a hash of many hashes that are all each hashes of hashes of copyrighted content? (The magnet link to a list of magnet links) Suppose I merely mention the name that you can google to find the hash of many hashes of hashes of copyrighted content? I wonder how many layers do we have to add before everyone admits that the situation is absurd?

So reword 'number' as 'ID'. Sure, you can't get around content being content by reframing it as a number. But this number is not content. It is solely an identifier. They are trying to make it illegal to mention the ID code of files.

Is it a common practice for corporations to sue political parties?

This will make for an interesting legal argument. The ruling compelled ISPs of a certain size to block access to TPB and the Pirate Party is not an ISP. It would be good for this to go to court to be re-examined given the ineffectiveness of the remedy.

Don't forget to donate to the Open Rights Group (www.openrightsgroup.org) if you support an open internet.

Pirate Party UK Donation page: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/Help

(Much needed) publicity for PPUK, and the issues of a censored internet.

I wonder if they'll go after the smaller ISPs as well which do not block anything at all?

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